City of God | Social Concerns

City of God Social Concerns

E. L. Doctorow's novel City of God is arguably his most ambitious, intellectually probing, and controversial literary effort to date. Among the important matters dealt with or touched on here, are the following: (1) evolution as a broadly based process in the universe and on earth; (2) small-particle physics, Creation theory, cosmology and astronomy; (3) the City as high concept (New York being considered as the embodiment of the City); (4) theology, theodicy (the justification of God's ways to humans) and religious practice; (5) the Holocaust experience; (6) philosophy (the nature of meaning, language, love, existence, reality, progress, et al.); (7) music theory; (8) cinematography; (9) song hits of the earlier twentieth century, and commentaries on them; (10) excerpts of biographies and autobiographies (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Everett's father and brother); (11) ideas for movie scenarios, including Nazi-hunter plots.

Much of the novel's raw material emerges from what the...
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