John Updikes in the Beauty of the Lilies Reviews

In The Beauty of The Lilies
By John Updike.
491 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

Domestic and epic, intimiste and magisterial, ''In the Dazzler of the Lilies'' begins with a sly misdirection. D. W. Griffith is filming ''The Call to Artillery'' on the grounds of a mock-medieval castle in Paterson, N.J., in the spring of 1910. Mary Pickford, curt of sleep and overcostumed for a hot twenty-four hours, faints. This scene takes two pages. But Griffith, Pickford and the Biograph Company never reappear in the novel; they are images raised to be wiped. Instead, cutting to:

Text:

''At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the rectory of the Quaternary Presbyterian Church at the corner of Directly Street and Broadway, felt the final particles of his religion leave him. The sensation was singled-out -- a visceral surrender, a gear up of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upwards.''

This champagney transformation of Clarence Wilmot leads into a densely compelling business relationship of the freedoms and terrors involved when a man of the cloth feels, and submits to, ''the calm, merciless, impersonal truths'' of irreligion. Information technology is not until the pagination is in iii figures that the movie theater is mentioned again. Nonetheless Mary Pickford has been there all the time, a questioning bubble in the reader's encephalon. Her loss of consciousness, her fall into darkness, are bluntly yoked past John Updike to Clarence's emergence into doubt'south sunshine. Why the linkage? Left to ourselves, we piece of work it out. The Rev. Clarence Wilmot and Mary Pickford, religion and the movies: two nifty illusionary forces, two worlds in which the key prototype is of darkness conquered by calorie-free.

The long filibuster of any overt linkage is part of the cleverness of the novel, which for one-half its length disguises itself as a family saga set against unrolling American history. Clarence loses his faith and becomes an encyclopedia salesman (a wry shift, since the encyclopedia too ''plays God'' and is a ''replica of Creation''); down mobility for his wife and three children ensues, then, following Clarence'southward death, a pauperish relocation to Delaware. The focus at this phase of the novel appears to be on the division between those who suffer life and those who seize it, between those fearful of reality and those who construct and command information technology. This schism is embodied in Clarence's ii sons: cheerful, pushy, book-ignorant Jared, a semicriminal entrepreneur who has caught ''the rhythm of America to come up'' and for whom life is explained in brash epigrams from the trenches, versus slow, diffident Teddy, the town postman, uncomfortable with given notions of manhood, uncompetitive (''withal this seemed the merely way to be an American'') and disturbed that others misstate ''the fragile nature of reality equally he needed to grasp it for himself.'' Movers and shakers versus watchers and decliners of life, with -- in the novel's terms -- comparative victory to the losers: irksome Teddy'southward courtship of and union to the maimed, disregarded just staunchly admirable Emily is in its exalted ordinariness the emotional high footing of the novel.

''In the Beauty of the Lilies'' is a compressed tetralogy, and it's possible Mr. Updike intended a sense of underlying symphonic guild: Teddy's story as the hushed ho-hum motion, followed by his daughter Essie's as the skittish, hard-driving scherzo. With Essie -- who travels from star-struck babe to teen-age model to cinema goddess to television doyenne -- the moving-picture show theme is finally given full voice. If (to put it overschematically) the first half of the book concerns itself with private responses to American reality, the second half, while continuing the family history, tracks in on how that reality is formed and perverted. Movies as escapism; movies as the model that pitiful reality attempts to match; movies as a college course of reality altogether, ''a realm beyond fourth dimension and space.'' Hollywood, with its new and lustrous gods and goddesses, supplants and even parodies old faith: thus when film stock changes from cellulose nitrate to cellulose acetate, immortality is assured, and every film-festival rerun offers a new resurrection of the torso. Fifty-fifty for those who hold to the old religion, the movies may become role of the divine plan: for Clarence's widow, Ama, Essie's success is God'due south mode of making things right for the family later on Clarence's ''fall.'' Mr. Updike does non quote it, but lurking hereabouts is that definition of the perfect Hollywood film: a tragedy with a happy ending. (Which would translate easily into religious terms: human being life followed by sky.)

Four generations. A great-grandfather who loses his organized religion and finds in the ''sorcery'' of the movies brief respite from ''the dour facts of life, his life, gutted by God's withdrawal''; a granddaddy whose life consists of ''guarded refusals,'' who retreats from both religion and ''American reality'' into a adoring spousal relationship; a mother who seeks, and mainly finds, in movie-distinction what others had previously sought in organized religion -- transcendence, higher reality, immortality, resurrections.

Then comes the son, Clark, in and for whom organized religion, the movies and the nature of American reality make a grim compact. Clark shares the first four letters of his proper noun with his swell-granddaddy, and when, afterward a neglected childhood, druggy growing upward and botched career in film production, he turns to religion, nosotros might be tempted to conclude that Clark was bringing the family history full circle. We might be further tempted when Clark, on his outset night at a Colorado district known equally the Temple, brushes his teeth with baking soda -- which long ago had been Clarence's addiction too. But circles are rarely full in life, and Clark'south orbit is lower and more degraded than his great-gramps's. Clark'southward American reality has had holes blown in information technology by drugs, while his movie saturation is such that the cinema rather than life has become his principal reference basis: every memory is an ''inner movie,'' and at one point he tin only make visual sense of a girl if he thinks of her as ''looking like Sissy Spacek used to.''

Simply the faith that appears to save Clark from corrupted reality is decadent itself: the Temple houses a crazy survivalist-Adventist sect that stockpiles guns while waiting for ''the Reckoning.'' These ''heroic believers,'' every bit Mr. Updike ironically terms them, are fueled past paranoia, spiritual elitism and a self-glorying decease wish: they are also ultimately competitive -- and therefore authentically American -- in their conventionalities that only 144,000 souls will make information technology into sky on the day of the Reckoning.

There is, inevitably, a Waco-style carnage, during which Clark kills the sect leader who is directing the murder of women and children. This may look like a redemptive act, but in fact is simply every bit movie-influenced as Clark'south other deeds: he knows what to practise less because of some moment of spiritual clarity than considering the cliche of action movies insists that the compromised hero retain our sympathy by killing the bad guys and and then dying himself.

This is, equally the ending confirms, a securely disenchanted novel: disenchanted with America, religion, the movies. It is not, nevertheless, a piece of dismayed authorial valetudinarianism, just rather a novel of accumulated wisdom, with Mr. Updike in full command of his subtle, crafty and endlessly observing art. The volume gives its final scenes to Teddy, the tedious raissonneur of the novel, whose spousal relationship to Emily is the narrative'southward tender yet unsentimental haven -- Teddy, who declines to come to judgment on the bad new days, remembering all too well how the bad old days were bad likewise. This is a novel that acknowledges with Clarence (via Einstein) that in this century ''the universe is getting stranger,'' just declines to endorse the all-American story of innocence and its loss. Rather, information technology is a novel that insists that the presumption of past innocence, the confidence 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 improve reality, for a world elsewhere and above.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/lifetimes/updike-lilies.html?_r=1

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