In The Beauty Of The Lilies

In The Beauty Of The Lilies THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
By John Updike In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910
and traces God’s relation to four generations of American
seekers beginning with Clarence Wilmot a clergyman in
Paterson New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace
at the movies respite from “the bleak facts of life his
life gutted by God’s withdrawal.” His son Teddy becomes a
mailman who retreats from American exceptionalism
religious and otherwise into a life of studied
ordinariness. Teddy has a daughter Esther who becomes a
movie star an object of worship an All-American goddess.
Her neglected son Clark is possessed of a native Christian
fervor that brings the story full circle: in the late
1980s he joins a Colorado sect called the Temple a handful
of “God’s elect” hastening the day of reckoning. In
following the Wilmots’ collective search for transcendence
John Updike pulls one wandering thread from the tapestry
of the American Century and writes perhaps the greatest of
his later novels.