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In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

Summary

John Updike's 17th novel is the absorbing saga of four generations of Wilmots, whose lives and occupations span huge portions of 20th-century America, running the gamut from preacher to encyclopedia salesman to movie star. The Wilmots' religious impulses take various forms: Clarence Wilmot is a traditional Presbyterian minister whose faith deserts him; his son, Teddy, is an atheist; his daughter, Essie, is a New Ager; and Essie's son is a Branch Davidian-style fanatic. Updike's lyrical exploration of the lives of middle-class Americans-achieved here with his usual grace and wit-is also a searching look at the place of religion in American life.

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Media Reviews

"'If God were eager to please, who would worship him?' This is said in either bitterness or acceptance. Both conditions are present in the novel, which is, finally a success."    -- Anita Brookner

   -- Spectator

"Domestic and epic, intimate and magisterial...a novel of accumulated wisdom, with Mr. Updike in full control of his subtle, crafty, and incessantly observing art....it is a novel that insists that the presumption of past innocence, the conviction of a fall, the gaudy lures and ashy disillusions of both religion and Hollywood, are all part of a wider if doomed American quest: for a better reality, for a world elsewhere and above."    -- Julian Barnes

   -- New York Times Book Review

"For all the narrative flash and flair and Updike's customary accretion of brilliantly realized detail from past and present, 'Lilies' is at heart an old-fashioned family chronicle that proves more modest than its panoramic vistas of 20th-century America....'Lilies' pursues the ache in the soul of 20th-century America with a great novelist's great leap of faith."    -- Steven Winn

   -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Happily, 'In the Beauty of the Lilies', which deals in part with a Koresh-like guru and his fiery end, is so good that its topicality seems the least interesting thing about it....The paradoxical intimacy and strangeness [Americans] feel toward the Christian God become for Mr. Updike a metaphor for the religious doubts of 20th-century man and his progress away from and then back to religion. Yet Mr. Updike's own faith is that of his creation, Clarence Wilmot: a faith in personal authenticity and instinctive humanity. It is a good religion for a novelist."    -- James Bowman

   -- Wall Street Journal

"John Updike's genius, his place beside Hawthorne and Nabokov have never been more assured, or chilling. One puts down this novel with the intimation that America is, very near its center, the saddest country on earth."    -- George Steiner

   -- New Yorker

"Not only John Updike's most ambitious novel but arguably his finest: a big, generous book...a wonderfully vivid cast...'In the Beauty of the Lilies' possesses the hard, diamond radiance of a fully imagined work of art...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....A dazzling novel."    -- Michiko Kakutani

   -- New York Times

"Updike's bold attempt at the generational saga...a more than commendable effort from an established master whose preeminence has much to do with his exuberant willingness to keep trying new things."

   -- Kirkus

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published date: 1997
Size: 5.5 x 0.5 inches
Weight: 0.85 pounds

Publisher's Notes

"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

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Random House Inc (1996) - from $1.00
• Paperback Reprint - Ballantine Books (1997) - from $1.00

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