City of God E L Doctorow Little, Brown 272pp, £15.99 ISBN 0375408169

Novelists are frequently criticised for endlessly writing the same novel, but the truth is that this is what we like about them: we know what we are getting when we see their name on the cover. With Doctorow's previous works - such as Loon Lake, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel and The Waterworks - he usually presents an historical setting, and an historian's understanding of America: the new world, as it sought to define itself, themes of immigrants' hardships, social injustice and a background sense of the menace and the wonder of human and industrial progress. There are defined and developed characters and Doctorow's striking visual imagery, his muscular prose and carefully paced storytelling. If he doesn't always write a linear narrative - as in Ragtime - at least we sense a consistent and coherent authorial presence carrying us along. We get a good read.

All this is abandoned in City of God. Instead, Doctorow sets out consciously, self-confessedly even, to present a review of the 20th century, with its cataclysmic events and ideas, its wars and cultural experiments. There is also a story of sorts. Thomas Pemberton, an Episcopalian rector in Manhattan, is losing his faith, if not in God then certainly in his religion, and is on the verge of being "decertified" by his bishop. A worthless brass cross behind the altar of his church is stolen and reappears on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism. Is it simply an act of vandalism? A threat? Or perhaps even a sign? Our hero sets out to investigate.

Pemberton befriends the rabbi and his wife, before the narrative switches to scientists, Holocaust survivors, film-makers, ornithologists, Wittgenstein, theologians, singers, war veterans, and even Einstein.

It is not always clear who is talking or why. Doctorow moves from highbrow to vernacular, from prose to verse and snatches of song lyrics, from involved narratives to casual asides, from ranting to tender observations.

Thematically, at least, there is consistency. Where is God? the voices ask. If I can't find God in my church, my ritual, the sacred texts that my logical and scientific mind rejects, then where else? God is life, seems to be the conclusion they all reach. "You want God?" asks a Jewish tailor in a Lithuanian ghetto. "Don't look at scripture, look everywhere - at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That's the kind of God you're dealing with."

Despite the excellence of his work and his deep understanding of American culture and its European roots, Doctorow has never quite achieved the status of such contemporaries as John Updike or Saul Bellow. It would be a shame if this - a loose, postmodern jumble that stands outside his canon - becomes the book that finally gives him the acclaim he deserves. It might encourage him to write another. This reader will not complain when the author resumes writing the kind of book he usually writes, the kind he's best at.

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