In The Beauty Of The Lilies (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
It is a tour-de-force, a novel that telescopes 80 years of American history through the lives of four characters. A Presbyterian minister who loses his faith. A young man who fears the world and so settles for the routine of mail delivery. A Hollywood star. A joiner of a religious cult. What connects them is family, for the cult follower is the son of the Hollywood star, who is the daughter of the mailman, who is the son of the minister. Through these four generational representatives, Updike traces the loss of religious faith in American society, and its attempted replacement by cinematic and fanatic illusions.And yet the characters are no mere tools. I finish reading the novel, feeling that I have lived with Clarence, Teddy, Essie, and Clark, that they are people I could have known had I lived in their time and place. Their realism is borne out not only by the acute observations and evocative language of the novel, but also by the clear motive force in their psychology. The same intellectual idealism that drove Clarence in his theological studies leads to his spiritual crisis. The sharp descent in the family's status and wealth causes Teddy's insecurities. Petted and pampered by her parents, though for different reasons, Essie grows to believe that she is the center of the universe. Neglected by a celebrity mother, Clark turns to one who gives him a sense of destiny. These people are not hard to understand. The same continuities that tie them together as a family appear in their individual characters. They develop but they don't change. There is no radical break in family or character.When all is clear, all is too clear. And here is my reservation about the novel: though it struggles with the dark topics of religious doubt and death, it betrays a certain optimism in its power to illuminate the struggle. On the plot level, the optimism reveals itself at the end in an act of heroism. Despite everything, Updike seems to say, there is hope. James Wood in London Review of Books (quoted in Wikipedia) expresses the criticism more trenchantly:For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.What Wood describes, stripped of its negative evaluation, is characteristic of Comedy. Updike may be usefully seen as a comedic writer. Wood's judgment, like mine, may, finally, say more about the spirit of our times than about the novel. The Tragic is, we think, a more suitable mode for representing our world. We want our literature to render us speechless.
I'm very excited about In the Beauty of the Lilies, a 1996 novel by John Updike. It's one of those multi-generational novels set against the backdrop of American history that I love. In this case it's 80 years of the Wilmot family. The story begins in 1910 in Patterson NJ when actress mary Pickford faints on a movie set. In those days movies were shot on the East coast. It would be a few years before studios were in California. Movies will remain an important part of the novel throughout. Across the street, Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, is having a crisis of faith, a big one. He just stops believing. Since he's an honest man, he can't continue preaching to his flock things hehimself no longer believes. After much discussion with his wife, other pastors and others, he quits his job and works unsuccessfully as an encyclopedia salesman, while the family descends into poverty. In one touching scene, he unknowingly calls on the household of a woman who had once worked as the Wilmot family maid. He becomes ill and dies and the second part features his youngest son Teddy, an amiable underachiever resigned to living in the shadow of his more successful older brother Jared. The family has relocated to Delaware. Part 3 is about Teddy's daughter Essie who is "discovered"after coming in third in a Miss Delaware Peach contest and becomes movie star Alma DeMott. Part 4 is about her son Clark, who moves to Colorado after drifting about on the fringes of the movie business and becomes involved with a religious cult evidently sort of a combination of the Branch Davidians and Church Universal anbd Triumphant. The sisters pose as ski bunnies and hit the town nightspots, pulling in lonely, horny, aimless young men. Sex as a conversion strategy is not uncommon for cults. this will probably be one of my favorite reads for 2013.
What do You think about In The Beauty Of The Lilies (1997)?
La saga de una familia debe presentar grandes dificultades para el escritor. Creo que Updike comienza de manera destacada pero la mitad de la historia cae en estereotipos, aburrimiento, se degrada; no por ello se puede dejar de apreciar la capacidad del escritor para emprender una novela de este alcance.
—Daniel Trejo
Updike is a writer who, frankly, just leaves me in awe. A brilliant mind working with the complexity of human relationships. He shows no interest in trying to dumb everythig down into a pseudo-Faulkner dream scape. Updike reveals life as people actually live in the un-pretty-fied world, within different social groups, over long periods of time. He's unbelievably detailed in his research and able to give the reader the perspective of so many diverse characters, with no superimposed judgement....no matter how extreme outcome. As I read this novel, it occurred to me that Updike had left me in that position, as he intended. To the extent I could make a judgement about the lives of any of the characters, it was slow to develop, refined and nuanced, filtered, as it was, with compassion and understanding.
—Phil Koehler
I began this book on page 163.John Updike is a wonderful writer, with keen powers of perception and description. I have read most of his novels, and a smattering of book reviews and essays. When he died earlier this year I re-read some of his earlier work (the Rabbit series, the Bech series, the Maples stories), but never this one.But to get back to page 163: "The girl dressed in a slightly off-key way...a little too fancily for everyday some days, her hair done up behind in an old-fashioned ribbbon, and then on other days too plain, with potting soil besmirching her gingham dress and her stockings speckled with bits of mulching hay. She had to order a new leg brace and orthopedic shoe, a high top with built-up sole..She had fallen into (Doc Hedger's) hands and the prescriptions of his she brought in-APC, morphine sulfate, pain-easing linaments-told a sad story of discomfort that her lovely clear eyes and cheerful factual manner concealed". Well, who wouldn't be drawn in? I read 20 more pages at the library before checking it out and forcing myself to go back and start from page 1.The novel chronicles 4 generations of a family, starting with Clarence in the early 1900's, a Presbyterian Minister in Paterson NJ who loses his faith and ends up a door-to-door salesman; his son Teddy (who meets the crippled Emily (see page 163 above)in the 1920's, in Delaware); their daughter Essie, who brings us up to the 50' and 60's, and then to her son Clark as the closerSo, the novel spans a century and this is something of a tour de force for Updike, whose close observation of time and place illuminates the novel. Unfortunately, this 'illumination' gets a little bogged down for me in Essie's Movie star career (at times, a long list of movies, stars, and conquests); I liked best the courting of Teddy and Emily and their brief honeymoon in Philadelphia (circa 1927): beautifully written prose with detail upon enchanting detail unfolding.Updike is so studious of time and place in this book, and such a craftsman in his prose in general, that this novel cannot be said to be even close to a failure. He is one of those writers (at least for me) who can draw one in and hold one fast for hours.
—Richard Needham
