BOOKS OF THE TIMES;Seeking Salvation On the Silver Screen - The New York Times SectionsSEARCH Skip to contentSkip to site index Books Log in Today’s Paper Books|BOOKS OF THE TIMES;Seeking Salvation On the Silver Screen https://nyti.ms/297DCQ9 Advertisement Continue reading the main story Supported by Continue reading the main story BOOKS OF THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE TIMES;Seeking Salvation On the Silver Screen By Michiko Kakutani Jan. 12, 1996 Credit...The New York Times Archives See the article in its original context from January 12, 1996, Section C, Page 1Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES By John Updike 491 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. YEARS ago, in one of his glittering essays, John Updike wrote of his admiration for novels that "give us, through the consciousness of characters, a geography amplified by history, a chunk of the planet." Up until now, the chunk of planet Mr. Updike has chosen to explore himself -- 20th-century America, as colonized by the middle class -- has been most knowingly and most intimately chronicled in his Rabbit novels, a quartet of books that gave us four decades of American life as seen through the experiences of a high school basketball star turned car salesman, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom. Now, in his dazzling new novel, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," Mr. Updike takes on an even more daunting project: to chart the fortunes of an American family through four generations and some 80 years, and in doing so, create a portrait of the country, from its nervous entry into the 20th century to its stumbling approach to the millennium. "In the Beauty of the Lilies" -- which takes its clumsy title from a line in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- is not only Mr. Updike's most ambitious novel to date, but arguably his finest: a big, generous book, narrated with Godlike omniscience and authority and populated by a wonderfully vivid cast of dreamers, wimps, social climbers, crackpots and lost souls, a book that forces us to reassess the American Dream and the crucial role that faith (and the longing for faith) has played in shaping the national soul. Religion, of course, has rumbled through the pages of Mr. Updike's fiction from the start, from books like "The Poorhouse Fair" and "A Month of Sundays" through "Couples" and "Roger's Version." Most of Mr. Updike's heroes feel themselves torn between their spiritual aspirations and their fleshly compulsions, between their yearning for redemption and their dark suspicion that no meaning exists. Like Henry Bech, they worry that they are nothing but "a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust." Like the witches of Eastwick, they see that "the outside of things was sunshine and scatter" while "the inside of everything was death." These existential anxieties culminate in the opening pages of "The Lilies," when the progenitor of Mr. Updike's American family, the Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, suffers an acute spiritual crisis. It is 1910, and at 2 o'clock one fine spring afternoon in Paterson, N.J., Clarence feels "the last particles of his faith leave him" forever. The loss comes as a palpable, physical sensation, and it leaves Clarence adrift in a universe suddenly rendered empty and devoid of hope. A Presbyterian minister by vocation, Clarence realizes that his loss of faith will have worldly consequences for his family as well: namely, the loss of their parish-owned house and their social standing in the community. In fact, employment for a lapsed minister is hard to come by, and Clarence soon finds himself going door-to-door hawking cheap encyclopedias: items he regards as vaguely blasphemous products, "a commercially inspired attempt to play God, by creating in print a replica of Creation." In his free time, Clarence goes to the movies, where he watches the world being created anew in newsreels and features and shorts. Clarence's youngest son, Teddy, inherits his sense of defeat, his desire to survive "this vale of tears" with "minimal damage." Though he suspects that "the only way to be an American" is to go out into the world and compete, he prefers to sit at home "collecting innocent things -- stamps from foreign countries that gave pieces of paper the power to fly around the globe." He will eventually become a postman in the small Delaware town of Basingstoke. Teddy is defiant in only one area: he cannot forgive God for failing to give his father, Clarence, a sign, some small encouragement that might have enabled him to hold on to his elusive faith. The closest Teddy ever expects to come to a religious experience is the blinding realization that he should forsake his flailing efforts to pursue a career in New York, and instead return home and marry his old sweetheart, Emily, a pretty girl with a clubfoot who shares his sense of diminished expectations. It is Teddy and Emily's beautiful daughter, Essie, who approaches life -- and faith -- with supreme self-confidence, an attitude of entitlement that enables her to glide from experience to experience, undamaged by disappointment or fear or ordinary mortal doubt. Convinced of her own perfection, Essie leaves Basingstoke for a modeling career in New York, and from New York makes the leap to Hollywood, where she becomes, however briefly, a screen goddess on a par with Grace Kelly, Rita Hayworth and Doris Day. She stars in movies with Clark Gable, Bing Crosby and William Holden, racks up a series of disappointing marriages and in 1959 gives birth to a son named Clark. For Essie (or Alma, as she has become known in the business), God is simply a benign heavenly presence, dedicated to fulfilling her wishes. For her, the Protestant work ethic has become simple ambition, while faith has devolved into a kind of good luck charm, a token of her belief in her own (and America's) manifest destiny. Faith does not come so easily to Essie's son, Clark, though he has inherited her yearning for purpose and her talent for self-reinvention. After years of drifting vaguely through the movie business, Clark winds up in Colorado, where a pretty young woman named Hannah introduces him to Jesse Smith, a David Koresh-like cult leader who preaches an apocalyptic doctrine of sin, salvation and wrath. Clark, who is rechristened Esau at the commune, doesn't completely buy Jesse's preaching, but he's interested in sleeping with Hannah and in participating in something that sets him apart from his famous mother. His decision to join Jesse's cult will later make headlines, when a bloody, Waco-like showdown with the police ensues. Although Mr. Updike credits a huge number of books (including "Mad Man in Waco" by Brad Bailey and Bob Darden, "Inside the Cult" by Marc Breault and Martin King, "The Story of Cinema" by David Shipman, and "Grace" by Robert Lacey) as source material for his saga of the Wilmots, there is nothing the least bit forced or contrived about his use of this information. Unlike his last novel, "Brazil" (1994), which read like a hastily assembled compendium of undigested material, "The Lilies" possesses the hard, diamond radiance of a fully imagined work of art. While seamlessly weaving the private travails of his characters into the public tapestry of history, Mr. Updike has also managed to endow them with a genuine sense of familial history, subtly showing us how emotions, habits and weaknesses are handed down generation to generation, like expensive, fragile antiques. We see how Essie mistakes her grandfather's sad, broken faith for something saintlike and divine, and how her son in turn mistakes passion and anger for true belief. We see how the Wilmots' cranky individualism propels them out of a small town in the East into the wide, open spaces of the West, and how their sense of apartness -- that "floating sensation" that "there was nowhere in mankind" where they comfortably fit -- leads to achievement, pain and grief. While the presiding image of "Rabbit Redux" (1971) was the moonshot in all its hope and glory, the informing metaphor of "The Lilies" is a more ambiguous one: the metaphor of the movies, which are for Mr. Updike's characters a secular substitute for religion, promising eternal life (on celluloid) in place of real redemption, narrative order in place of Calvinist predestination. In tracing the history of the Wilmot family, from Clarence, who trades the pulpit for an anonymous seat in a dark theater, to Clark, who becomes the star in a bloody shootout shown on the evening news, Mr. Updike has written an important and impressive novel: a novel that not only shows how we live today, but also how we got there. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Site Index Site Information Navigation © 2021 The New York Times Company NYTCo Contact Us Work with us Advertise T Brand Studio Your Ad Choices Privacy Policy Terms of Service Terms of Sale Site Map Canada International Help Subscriptions