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Review

Rating: 10

Featuring what Doctorow has called a “kitchen sink” prose style, this novel struck me as a wonderfully unusual book with a liberating narrative technique that breaks many of the so-called “rules” of the novel.

The Houston Chronicle called it “The greatest American novel of the past 50 years . . . reading City of God restores one’s faith in literature,” and I am inclined to agree. Reminiscent of Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges, I am also remind of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the way that this novel does not easily lend itself to distillation or reduction.

The book conflates all sorts of literary forms and genres and serves up a stew of fragmented biographical sketches, Homeric verse poems, prayers, and jazz-like improvisations on pop standards, all of which orbit around the narrative’s central issue.