%1

Something evolving

City of God, by E.L. Doctorow

Nothing if not ambitious, E. L. Doctorow's latest novel attempts a spiritual summation of the 20th century, written in a postmodern register. The list of Big Topics the novel covers includes cosmology, starting with the Big Bang; the ideas of Einstein and Wittgenstein; the two world wars; the Jewish Holocaust; and the ascendancy of the visual over the verbal in our digitized culture. What makes the novel worth the careful attention of people of faith is its attempt to make religious sense of a profoundly reshuffled cultural deck.