In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike

His gift has been to find among some beautifully observed particulars a kind of transcendence that makes his people take on a glow beyond the realism he manages so well.

The four-generational panorama does not suit Updike’s strengths. In between lies most of a century of national illusion: the movie-television-celebrity culture that has replaced our hard spiritual questions-for a while. Clarence loses faith, Clark finds it and their opposite motions are both disastrous. The author no longer walks with his protagonists but speeds by them they are landmarks on a circular tour of American change and recurrence. “Lilies” is a departure for Updike, a roman fleuve that takes up its characters, holds them in their segment of time and relinquishes them to make way for a new segment of time and a succeeding generation of characters. Clark, her hippie and ski-bum son, drifts into the Temple, a heavily armed apocalyptic cult that awaits an imminent Day of Reckoning in the Colorado mountains. Teddy’s daughter Esther, all looks and ambition, and with those afternoon movies in her gene-pool, becomes a Hollywood star of the 1940s and ‘50s. Teddy, shattered by his father’s fall, takes refuge in a small Delaware town to live out the American dream as American snooze, contenting himself with a placid marriage and a job as a postman. He ends his days peddling encyclopedias door to door and sneaking into afternoon movies. Paul, is knocked off his mount-a comfortably middle-class pastoral life-by a Darwin-and-Nietszche-assisted vision not of God but of no God. These are the four generations of Wilmot-justifying:Ĭlarence, opposite to St. “In the Beauty of the Lilies” (from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” verse that equates American destiny with Christ’s holiness) reverses Milton, however: Updike’s religious dimension is more nearly a matter of justifying man’s ways to God than the other way round. The Lord taketh away and the Lord giveth in John Updike’s panoramic novel, which swoops over America’s 20th century and wrings from our country’s spectacular material progress the eschatological ghosts that haunt it. Eighty years later, his great-grandson undergoes a religious epiphany as he dies by fire in a cult commune under attack by federal agents. In 1910, Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister in Paterson, N.J., loses his religious faith.

In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike