In the Beauty of the Lilies

Rating:
Summary: Going Downhill
Review: 'In The Beauty of the Lilies' is a sweeping novel, concentrating on the fortunes of the Wilmot family in twentieth-century America. It could also be viewed as Updike's take on the changing nature of Christian belief in the USA.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Reverend Clarence Wilmot is struggling with his loss of faith - his reading of atheistic texts and familiarity with Darwin's theory of evolution have undermined his faith. The focus of the novel then changes, with the emergence of the cinema and Hollywood's domination of popular culture. Screen stars and the movies becoming, in effect, a new religion. As the century draws to its close, Christianity revives but among weird sects, whose 'prophets' worship the Bible in one hand and the gun in the other.

I thought the 'In The Beauty of the Lilies' was a very uneven novel: the first section, dealing with Clarence Wilmot, is Updike at his introspective best, examining the challenges to religious faith posed by 'modern' thought, and in an interesting section, how one organised religion was seeking to accommodate itself, or re-justify itself in the face of that challenge. Thereafter, Updike sacrifices such deep insight due to the fact that he has a huge amount of time to cover: the book becomes much more plot-driven, and here Updike is not nearly so compelling a writer: at times it read little better than a soap opera, the characters becoming stereotypes. There are interesting sections (some of the Hollywood stuff is well written) but overall it doesn't live up to the promise of the beginning.

G Rodgers

Rating:
Summary: In the beauty of the lilies...
Review: ...Christ was born across the sea.... . So goes the Union's Civil War marching song. Analogous to Woody Allen's descent into the need for psychotherapy coreresponding to his lack of belief in anything but "quarks", a Calvinistic preacher loses his faith and the sins of the grandfather are visited upon a sequence of generations, albeit with enough sexual satisfaction and frustration along the way. In the Rabbit series there was a separate book for each phase of Rabbit Ångström's miserable life, but here the exciting genealogy of three generations is traced, ending in disaster. Updike's preoccupation with his Glied, expressed vividly enough in Brazil, continues here.

One wants to read cover to cover without pause, so well is the novel written.

...

Rating:
Summary: Simple- One the Great American Novels!!..
Review: I admit that I tried some of Mr. Updike over the years,and never even made it to first base. It seemed he was way overpraised.But then I chanced upon IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES. I'm glad I did.Mr. Updike rolls out a yarn here that seems to cover just about the entire American 20th century. All the characters are true to life, from the factory owners to the loyal union men in the beginning,and especially the Wilmot family over several generations.His sense of time and place is perfect. Paterson,NJ, makes a fine central location as the silk capital of the USA. A Methodist minister loses his faith,startling his wife, since he could lose his central position in the community. The good minister visits the church elder,and what follows may be the best discussion of religious faith in fiction. But this churchman cannot go on acting against his beliefs (make that non-beliefs). So he moves,his family fortunes go into decline,as predicted by his wife,and he attempts to sell encyclopedias to the mainly working class blue collar community...Now,all this is woven around together as in a movie reel,since the Hollywood Dream Machine plays a strong role throughout the novel.As the future unfolds,many other interesting segments follow,like the honeymoon in Philadelphia, the honeymooners stay in the grand Belleview Hotel, and their sense of being overwhelmed by this great city.Nice plug for a sometimes neglected great American city! This book is like unfolding a huge and beautiful tapestry that slowly turns into a magic carpet ride. A young lady family member in the 1930's becomes a very famous actress,and Mr. Updike gives wondrous descriptions of this event. Her son becomes a bit strange,and in searching for something,some faith that his forbear had long ago lost,ends up in an even stranger cult.Here the book may fall off slightly. Nonetheless,you'll keep turning the pages to the very end. The last line: "The children". Maybe I'll grab my copy, and give it a second go around!

Rating:
Summary: In the Beauty of the Prose
Review: John Updike is more intelligent and can spin out beautiful prose like no other living author I know of. His retrospective look at 4 generations of an American family growing up with America in the topsy-turvy 20th Century, is wonderful reading. (I am biased in feeling that on his worst day Updike is worth 50 of any other American authors.) Updike's plot (as usual) is not the highlight, although the four generation structure does raise questions of nature, nuture, inheritance of tragic flaws and hidden strengths. The characters, both major and minor, never fail to engage the reader, and the offhand aphorisms and sharp (and frequently bittersweet) observations about life are not to be missed. Beware, at the outset there is a thick mass of detail about Presbyterian criticism, mush on, and later some detailed descriptions of the contents of drug stores, but hang in there. Updike usually has an experiment in mind, this time God is a character, who acts on the lives of the everyday folks in ways large and small. I say don't miss it because Mr. U. is truly a great author, and if you don't hurry up and read this one, he will publish another one soon, and you will fall farther behind

Rating:
Summary: One family's relationship with God and Hollywood
Review: John Updike writes a sprawling story here following one family through four generations in the twentieth century and their very different relationships with God and cinema. The patriarch, Clarence Wilmot, is a Presbyterian minister who suddenly loses his faith in God. Believing that there is no God, he quits the ministry (which, due to outside pressure, is easier said than done). Clarence's honesty, if nothing else, must be appreciated. Someone with less integrity might have stayed in the ministry and become a precursor to John Shelby Spong (sorry, had to get that in). Clarence attempts to sell encyclopedias door-to-door, but increasingly spends more time at the movie theater. Is he looking for salvation in Hollywood?

Clarence's son, Teddy, has the most ordinary story of the Wilmot clan. Unambitious, though not lazy, he is content with the quiet life of a postman in a small Delaware town. Teddy never attends church, and seems to be unreligious, yet by marrying a handicapped girl seems to display an acceptance of the disenfranchised that has a spark of Christlikeness.

The next section of the story concerns Teddy's daughter Essie, who to me is the most problematic character in this book. Essie is constantly aware of God, and indeed would not know what it was like to not believe in God. Yet Essie's narcissism and self-centeredness betrays a very shallow faith. Infatuated with herself from a young age, she grows up to be a movie star, displaying the typical "godless" lifestyle that many perceive as typical of Hollywood. Belief in God is her "secret", and she keeps it well-hidden indeed, even from her own son.

Essie (who takes the name Alma DeMott--by the way, doesn't this sound more like a name for a star of the 1920's rather than the 1950's?) is a particularly neglectful mother to her son Clark. Clark becomes the typical Hollywood kid: drugs, sex, fast cars, and a generally shiftless lifestyle. He gets seduced by a Branch Davidian-type cult (a little TOO much like the Branch Davidians--Updike was trying too hard to be in step with current events here) and the story comes to a climax that is a little too predictable, although with an important twist, due to Clark's renegade nature. In a stange way, life has come full-circle for this family: Clarence loses faith in God and attempts to find escape in the movies, and his great-grandson loses faith in Hollywood and finds escape in a cult group and their counterfeit God.

Rating:
Summary: Beauty in the Beast
Review: My review of this book boils down to just this: John Updike is too good of a writer for this novel. The uneven story stretches from 1910 to 1990 and tells the story of the Wilmot family through four generations. Everyone in the Wilmot family has a selfish streak--Clarence's wife notes at one point--not unlike Franzen's "The Corrections" or Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury", which are both superior family sagas. The Wilmot family, though, lacks the complete dysfunctionality of the Lamberts or the inbreeding, racism, and tragic spirt of the Compsons.

Clarence Wilmot in 1910 loses his faith in God and gives up the ministry. I thought Clarence was a rather dull character and nothing much really HAPPENED in those first 100 pages or so that focus on him. But unlike the rest of the book, the first section only focuses on three years.

Teddy from 1914-193? is unnerved by Clarence's death and can't really settle on any kind of career that suits him. He eventually finds a happy little rut in the Postal Service and settles down with the first girl who takes an interest in him. Teddy is so dull that this part of the book was pretty much a waste of time.

Essie from 1936-1960 is an ambitious girl who after kissing a boy at 13 becomes a certain word that rhymes with "glut" and eventually at a beauty pageant meets a photographer who helps launch her career first in modeling and later in film, but at least Updike dodged the old cliche of having her sleep with the photographer. This section could have been named "Candle in the Wind" because like Norma Jean, Essie changes her name--to Alma DeMott--and eventually becomes a second-tier star, not quite a Marilyn Monroe or Doris Day, who Updike based the character on--read the acknowledgements in the back for confirmation of this. This section was interesting, but seeing Essie at age 7 and 13 didn't add a whole lot to my knowledge of the character. Eliminating those entirely would have allowed Updike to add more detail to her life in Hollywood, which was more interesting, although stereotypical.

Then for a while from 1960-1987 nothing really happens. Between Clarence and Teddy and Teddy and Essie there's really no break in the time between them, but starting with Essie, we start to see jumps in time first from 1936 to 1943 and then another to 1948 before the story goes pretty much straight on to 1960. But then there's the biggest jump of all between '60 and '87, although there are a couple of flashbacks to the '70s and early '80s, but not nearly the detail as in the rest of the book. This gives the novel an uneven flow by this point, almost as if Updike heard a clock ticking in his brain and knew he had to get this thing finished.

So then we pick up from 1987-1990 with Clark. Using Less Than Zero as a basis--see the acknowledgements again--Clark is the stereotypical Hollywood party boy into sex, drugs, and rock n roll. He winds up with his Great-Uncle Jared (Teddy's brother), working at Jared's ski lodge. Then he runs into a girl who he thinks is just another notch in the belt, but takes him back to the radical Jesse Smith's Lower Branch compound--Lower Branch/Branch Davidion, get it? With little prompting, Clark becomes a disciple and the cult's PR man. If you happened to be alive during the Waco siege, then you already know how this will end, except for one little twist that allows Clark a little bit of honor. This part especially seemed like a stereotype, although Updike takes pains not to make Jesse or the compound exactly like Koresh and Waco.

There's a lot of lip service given to God and each character has a different relationship with the Almighty. Clarence is a nonbeliever. Teddy is apathetic, or you might say wishy-washy. Essie believes in God sort of as a secret lover guiding her towards a fantastic destiny, but then after getting swept up in Hollywood, her devotion peters out. Clark is a wishy-washy fanatic and I never got the sense he really BELIEVED all the stuff Jesse preached--he just latched on to the cult because he couldn't find anything better to give his life to. These relationships are really my interpretation and I think it was all sort of half-baked at best. There wasn't enough in the story to really fill out those conclusions.

I think the problem is that Updike doesn't seem to know if he wants to chronicle American history through the 20th Century, document the growth of the American film industry, or detail changing relationships with God, so he tries to do all three at once and it isn't successful at any of the three. Jack of all trades, master of none.

What Updike is a master of is the craft of writing, so that even a flawed novel like "In the Beauty of the Lilies", while uneven and at times dull, still has some beautiful moments of prose. As a writer, I've been studying Updike's work, because I love the way he brings out small details, that while sometimes are too much and weigh the scene down, make a description come to life. It's really for those moments that I can give this 3 stars despite it's other problems. And while lip service is given to the relationships with God and the ties of family, it does give you sort of a topic sentence you can use to think about those issues yourself.

However, if you're just a reader, then I would suggest you not read this and try some of Updike's other works. Or better yet, read the two books I mentioned earlier.

Rating:
Summary: A Book that's Better Than Therapy
Review: This book was my introduction to Updike's work, and I must say I was impressed. "In the Beauty of the Lilies", the title of which is taken from a verse in the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", is, at least superficially, an examination of the role of religion in American life. The plot spans the whole of the 20th century and chronicles the lives of four generations of the Wilmot family. The history of American film is woven into the novel and used an effective metaphor for the personal and societal upheavals that beset the characters. The reader can't help but pick up some interesting facts about the history of film, but I found that sometimes the author allowed historical details to detract from the flow of the story. It is difficult to explain the psychological subtleties of the novel without being a "spoiler". The scope of the book is not limited to organised religion per se. The book is really about the basic human need for some kind of faith or committment, be it religious or not. Updike seems to be talking about the intimate link between personal integrity and a belief in something, or someone outside of oneself. "In the Beauty of the Lilies" is a powerful allegory which helped to bring my own existential beliefs into sharper focus. Since Amazon does not welcome explicit discussion of authors themselves, I will not reveal Updikes' own metaphysical stance. (Those who are interested can do a literature search and find out for yourselves.) I was impressed, however, that the author did not allow his work to become mere propaganda for his own metaphysical beliefs. The subtlety and complexity of the book is one of its greatest strengths. The characters are well-developed and plot is engageing enought to interest even those who prefer to gloss over the philosophical aspects of the book. I welcome any email discussion from people who have already "In the Beauty of the Lilies".

Rating:
Summary: As ye deal with my contemners
Review: This is the first of Updike's novels which I have read. I have a friend who holds a Masters degree in English literature who warned me before I began this book that Updike is over-rated. I enjoyed "The Beauty of the Lillies" and found the characters to be well drawn and compelling. Updike's commentary on American religion seems to be that we are either agnostics, like Clarence Wilmot, apathetic, like Teddy, uninvolved believers, like Emma/Alma, or fanatics, like Clark. Although the novel is a good read, I found it to be too long. I bogged down in the midst of the sea of detail regarding Emma's movies and affairs. This is an important book and deserves to be read. I will probably read more of Updike's work in the future.

Rating:
Summary: updike surfeit
Review: Updike has written some compelling novels, but this is not one of them. overwritten, tedious in places, yet rewarding in the early phases. Once Essie starts starring with Jimmie Stewart, Clark Gable, etc., the story loses whatever magic it had. And the wind up with a recreation of the WACO siege turns it into a pot-boiler. Maybr Updike has written himself out. At any rate he needs a better copy editor.