City of God

Another poem begins, this time from the point of view of the person who has been listening in the bar to Everett’s previous stories about his father and brother. The narrator is a Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair, reminiscent of the one protesting Pem’s ex father-in-law, and he spends his days in the bar drinking, with his days only broken up by whether or not the lonely woman at the end of the bar will take pity on him with intercourse.

He says that he isn’t sure that he can tell a story, because war cannot be understood with language. He describes images of purposeless violence against the people and the land coupled with the horrible atrocities that soldiers inflicted on themselves and each other. He says that it wasn’t war but “life as it is and was and always will be” (219). He then tells of the violin spider, a (possibly-invented) species that could wrap a man in its web within moments and kill them. He compares man to every other type of life, saying that humans have nothing to be proud of.

The novel returns to Everett and Pem as Pem explains how decertification from the church works. He is unsure of what his life will be like going forward, and he doesn’t know what to do with three decades of books and vestments. He also wonders what it will be like to no longer have a station that allows him to empathize with people professionally, such as when he goes to the cancer hospice. Going through his books, Pem finds Augustine’s City of God; he and Everett discuss its virtues, and Pem decides he will keep it along with his other books.

A final midrash of a jazz standard begins, this time of Frank Sinatra’s “The Song is You.” But after the lyrics are presented, the person conducting the midrash introduces Frank Sinatra himself, who is in the audience. Frank takes over and begins explicating the song as a “little plug for the trade” of songwriting before segueing into his childhood (224).

In his childhood, Frank’s mother rips his Bing Crosby picture down, and his father is a rough man who never learned to read. He turns to the streets of New Jersey, which are tough in their own way, especially for Frank, who sees himself as a wimpy kid.

He turns back to the song, explaining that the song’s “you” is his mother Franny, a nurse and mother to many in the neighborhood. Once, he saw a young woman undressing who was staying in their house before being interrupted by his mother. He implies that the song is about both of them and about the power that songwriting has over the listener.

Once a week, he and his group of teenage friends go to a Union City strip club, and Frank gets to understand a little bit about show business through those nights. In his own romantic life, he has bad luck, as women he dates think he’s got no future. He leaves most of his friends behind to go solo in his singing and listens to his heroes on an old radio. Eventually, he starts going to New York, first as an outsider sitting in the clubs trying to fit in, dreaming of being a singer while war and devastation happen around the world. He returns to the lyrics of the song, repeating the lyrics that he says are callow in relation to the gravity of the events happening around him.

The narrative shifts to the Ex-Times reporter who, after killing the S.S. officer, is feeling proud of himself. He starts dating a woman, and he starts planning his next move: confronting a Guatemalan death squad commander that now owns a mall restaurant in Queens. He travels out to the restaurant, where he sees the owner sitting at the bar. He returns two more times, surveilling the staff and owner, before two young men come sit at his table with him. They threaten him, and the owner comes over.

The ex-reporter declares himself an “avenging angel” and is restrained by the men (235). As they do, he spits in the Guatemalan man’s face; startled, the man falls backward and cracks his skull on the floor. The ex-reporter is released, and he learns the next day that the man died overnight.