By now, novelist E.L. Doctorow's approach has become familiar enough to border on the formulaic: Take an important historical moment (the 1939 World's Fair, the turn of the 20th century) or historical figure (Dutch Schultz, Daniel Rosenberg) and create around them a richly textured work that reveals something about the past, the present, and the inextricability of the two. It's little wonder, then, that for the new City Of God, Doctorow opted to do something different. What's surprising is that different for Doctorow turns out to be a sort of slightly out-of-date postmodern-novel-by-numbers featuring disparate but thematically related strands, layers of narrative (there's fiction within fiction within fiction), the appearance of the author as a character, references to the turning of the millennium, and an unabashed fixation on the "big questions." Even without its title, City Of God announces its grand ambitions from the first page, a meditation on the Big Bang. From there, Doctorow could, by definition, go anywhere, but the novel settles into the 20th century and the contemporary search for meaning, particularly as revealed by the relationship between a widowed rabbi and a single Episcopalian priest, their real-life counterparts (ecumenically minded friends of Doctorow), fragments of an in-progress novel, an author surrogate who creates imaginary novels from the elements around him, free-verse reminiscences, analyses of popular song lyrics, and monologues from, among others, Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Sinatra. Wildly ambitious, in a strangely familiar way, the ultimate irony of City Of God may be that its most successful portions are also those most closely aligned with Doctorow's past work, particularly the novel-in-progress abandoned halfway through, a moving account of life in a WWII Jewish ghetto. Doctorow is probably incapable of writing a less-than-compelling novel, but the subject of his latest—post-Holocaust theology in the vastness of a silent universe—is seldom a good match with its too-precious structure. When a character finally brings up the St. Augustine work from which the novel takes its title, it's akin to lighting up the applause sign.