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The Beauty of the Lilies

The Beauty of the Lilies
By John Updike
Hamish Hamilton.
£16.00. Hardback.

John Updike's 17th novel In the Beauty of the Lilies - written as he approaches old age - is not the work of a card-carrying evangelical. Updike's mentor is Karl Barth, he is deeply concerned with the implications of a God of utter Otherness, and strives to analyse an America that at the millennium can only look back on a crisis of faith and of humanity itself.
In its 500 pages, the novel portrays American life from 1910 to 1990 through the eyes of four generations. It begins with a quite brilliant portrait of a Presbyterian pastor losing his faith; moves on to the story of his son Teddy, a postman in a small suburban town; then tells the story of Essie his daughter, who enters Hollywood by way of a sleazy modelling career; and finishes with the story of Clark, Essie's only son, who becomes Press Officer for a religious cult that Updike has clearly modelled on David Koresh's Temple at Waco, Texas.
Behind everything is Hollywood. Harsh reality - recession, war, civil strife, racial tension, etc. - is balanced against the dream machine that transforms Essie into the fabulous, famous and eventually deeply unhappy Alma de Mott.

The pastor

The pastor whose story opens the books has no such solace. This is the world of Old Princeton, of Warfield and Hodge, of Presbyterian manses where the food is plentiful, the pastor much respected, the walls of faith strong and secure. Yet for Clarence Wilmot those walls are crumbling fast. It's the period of Higher Criticism, of Renan and Strauss - Updike has done his research extremely well, and brings to life the comfortable details of the pastor' library, but also the agonising doubts that have brought him to the point of resigning. His church superior offer him a way to remain: the new liberal thinking; it explains away all the problems. But the pastor has too much integrity. He leaves his ministry and comfortable income to become an encyclopaedia salesman (a deliberate irony).
Wilmot's loss of faith creates a profound emptiness at the heart of the story, clearly intended as a metaphor of American 20th-century life and bequeathed to the rest of the book. One of the novel's larger implicit questions is: 'Where has God gone?' There's a touching description of post-Christian values valiantly held in the lives of Teddy and his wife, the club-footed Emily. Teddy's passion for good architecture in post offices, Emily's simple uncomplicated morality; their first sexual fumblings are recorded, but only in the context of betrothal and marriage; this is a world in which sex is still a private matter to be enjoyed in marriage. The coarsening of many characters' language and personal morality as the century proceeds is itself a moral gloss on the history Updike is narrating.

Hollywood

The alternative hopes of Hollywood are shown to be fragile; the Arbuckle case rocks America, Essie/Alma's life fades into a twilight of failed marriages and failed hopes, the idol Clark Gable has halitosis . . . but Updike is never simplistic. He has some harsh words to say about the Christian Right, too. The absence of God from American society cannot be filled with lesser hopes, whether built on too little of God or too much.
The apocalyptic ending - a Waco-style holocaust - leaves the question of future generations' fate open. God is still there, though so many have rejected or misappropriated him. 'There has to be something there to make it all right in the end', one character says wistfully. 'Like in the moves', says another, neatly summarising the intelligent tension of the book.
The title (from The Battle Hymn of the American Republic) hints at the dangers of equating the wishes of God with the destiny of America. Christ, Updike obscurely observed recently, was indeed 'born across the sea' and Updike intends his writings to address the implications of that separation.

Where is God?

Evangelicals will agree with much of Updike's analysis, but may question some of his conclusions. I would have liked more place given to the daily walk with God which perhaps distinguishes evangelicalism from Barthianism. Is there no intermediate point between the dour, unaccountable God that Wilmot perceives and the bizarre fundamentalist sectarianism of the final pages? It's hinted at: Clarence's wife calls faith a 'habit'; I wish Updike had explored this contrast with Clarence's learnt but ultimately impoverishes faith. And some readers, it must be said, will be unhappy with the unsparing and vivid way that Updike records the moral and sexual decline of America (though much less explicitly than in Couples, his 1968 novel of sexual and religious crisis in American suburbia, which has some links with In the Beauty of the Lilies).
But few who care about religious perspectives on the modern world will find the book less than significant, and many will find this great and enthralling novel a stimulating and provocative debate on our century.

David Porter