In the Beauty of the Lilies - Hardcover

Updike, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679446400 ISBN 13: 9780679446408

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows readers an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the Moving Picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.

About this title

About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, worked for a few years on the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of some forty books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rabbit at Rest was recently awarded the Howells Medal, by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for the most distinguished work of American fiction of the last five years.

From the Inside Flap

tely bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows readers an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the Moving Picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.

Reviews

The saga of one family's journey through the spiritual landscape of 20th-century America, Updike's 17th novel opens in 1910, just as Theodore Wilmot's father, a Presbyterian minister, suddenly loses his faith. His loss is visceral, and no amount of intellectualizing can deter him from his realization that he must leave the pulpit if he is to remain true to himself. Eighty years later, Theodore's grandson, a lost soul in the post-Vietnam War era who has found strange comfort in a radical religious cult, experiences his own catharsis, as the flames literally rage around him. In the intervening years, we follow the lives of Theodore himself, a good man who has no outward faith and little ambition, and his daughter, Esther, who becomes a modern-day sort of goddess?a movie star. Updike is an astute observer of the American experience and in Theodore Wilmot has created a quintessential 20th-century everyman. Despite an occasional lapse into stereotypical characterization (e.g., the "gay cousin"), this well-wrought tale engages both emotion and intellect. A major novel by a major novelist, it belongs in libraries of every sort.
-?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As prolific as he is, there has never even been a sense of redundancy in Updike's magnificent flow of novels and short-story collections, each book continuing in its own fashion to cover new ground. His latest novel is a staggeringly involving and intelligent allegory of twentieth-century American culture that, at the same time, and though steeped in symbolism, also succeeds as a warm-blooded story with bona fide characters. It opens in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1910. "At the moment Mary Pickford fainted" while making a movie close by, Presbyterian minister Clarence Wilmot loses his faith. That loss precipitates another loss: his job. Since "now he was free--free to sink," he turns to selling encyclopedias door to door and to an addictive habit of watching the fabulous new medium, moving pictures. Updike then tells of the following three generations of Clarence's family: his son, a flaccid individual who marries a woman of strong religious faith; his daughter, who becomes a famous movie star; and her son, who winds up on the wrong side of a shootout with federal authorities at a Rocky Mountain cult headquarters. Updike's soaring novel becomes an extended yet taut metaphor for the secularization of religion and the concomitant infatuation with movies as a substitute for religion. Brad Hooper

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679446400
• ISBN 13: 9780679446408
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 491