In the Beauty of the Lilies - Softcover

Updike, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449225518 ISBN 13: 9780449225516

Publisher: Fawcett Books, 1996

Synopsis

Through four generations--from Clarence Wilmot, a lapsed minister-turned-encyclopedia salesman, in 1910, to the present-day--one family pursues the American obsession with God and the unreal world of the motion picture

About this title

Review:

When Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian clergyman, loses his faith and becomes an encyclopedia salesman, he opens the saga of one American family's twentieth-century relationship with God and all things religious.

From the Inside Flap:

"IT WILL LEAVE YOU STUNNED AND BREATHLESS. . . . With grand ambition, [Updike] not only tracks the fortunes and falls of an American family through four generations and eight decades but also creates a shimmering, celluloid portrait of the whole century as viewed through the metaphor of the movies."
--Miami Herald

"AN IMPORTANT AND IMPRESSIVE NOVEL: a novel that not only shows how we live today, but also how we got there. . . . 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."
--The New York Times

"STIRRING AND CAPTIVATING AND BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN . . . [This] new novel displays a depth and a narrative confidence that make one sigh with sweet anticipation. This is the Updike of the Rabbit books, who can take you uphill and down with his grace of vision, his gossamer language, and his merciful, ironic glance at the misery of the human condition."
--The Boston Globe

"AWESOME . . . Updike's genius, his place beside Hawthorne and Nabokov have never been more assured, or chilling."
--The New Yorker

"POWERFUL."
--The Atlanta Journal Constitution

About this edition

• Publisher: Fawcett Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0449225518
• ISBN 13: 9780449225516
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 468