When Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian clergyman, loses his faith and becomes an encyclopedia salesman, he opens the saga of one American family's twentieth-century relationship with God and all things religious.


From Publishers Weekly
The spiritual and sexual malaise of a multigenerational American family is the focus of Updike's masterful novel, a six-week PW bestseller. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
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.


From The Boston Review
At the opening of Updike's novel, the reverend Clarence Wilmot pauses on the stairs of his New Jersey rectory: he has lost his faith. Updike traces the seismic, escalating impact of this counter-revelation through Clarence's own life and through those of the next three generations of Wilmots: Teddy, Clarence's oversensitive, agnostic son; Essie, who inherits Clarence's fanatical, otherworldly devotion to the movies and becomes a film star; and Clark, Essie's son, alien- ated by his mother's neglect, desperate for a spiritual center. Updike's narrative structure is well-orchestrated, but the later, more public characters lack the quietly engaging idiosyncrasies of their predecessors. The Wilmots come to fascinate the world, but the reader grows increasingly uncertain as to why. Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
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


Book Description
"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


From the Inside Flap
"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


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 Hardcover edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

John Updike's seventeenth novel begins in 1910, and traces God's relation to four generations of an American family, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith, and becomes an encyclopedia salesman and a motion-picture addict. The remainder of Clarence's family moves to the small town of Basingstoke, Delaware, where his cautious son, Teddy, becomes a mailman. Faithless himself, Teddy marries a good Methodist girl and begets Esther, whose prayers are always answered; she becomes an object of worship, a twentieth-century goddess. Her neglected son, Clark, makes his way back to the fiery fundamentals of Protestant piety. The novel ends in 1990, in Lower Branch, Colorado, and on television. Taking its title from the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic," In the Beauty of the Lilies spins one saga, one wandering tapestry thread, of the American Century.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The spiritual and sexual malaise of a multigenerational American family is the focus of Updike's masterful novel, a six-week PW bestseller. (Jan.)

Library Journal

An elder statesman of American letters here tells of four generations of Wilmots, who run the gamut from preacher to encyclopedia salesman to movie star.

Jim Paul

John Updike's seventeenth novel is a sprawling family saga that traces four generations of the God-struck Wilmot clan. Late in his career, Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, suddenly loses his faith in God. Clarence's principled resignation from his ministry plunges his family into poverty, and he is reduced to selling encyclopedias door-to-door and going to movie matinees for comfort. His son, Teddy, having witnessed his father's failure, rejects God as well and lives out a cautious existence as a mailman in a small town in Delaware. In the book's third section, Teddy's daughter Essie, raised in small-town security and love, full of "this joy at being herself instead of somebody else," feels inexplicably bound to both God and the movies, and she grows up to become a movie star in the Clark Gable-Gary Cooper era. And Updike brings this novel's interrogation of faith full circle when Essie's troubled son, Clark, ultimately flees L.A., joins a Christian cult in Colorado, and is killed in a thinly-fictionalized version of the Branch Davidian debacle.

Updike seems utterly at home in the first half of In the Beauty of the Lilies --the title is taken from The Battle Hymn of the Republic -- describing the daily round of middle class life in the early part of this century. His filigreed style, best suited to set-piece description and slow character development, is often reminiscent here of American naturalists such as Wharton, Howells or Dreiser, who took for their canvas society as a whole and for their subject, the subtle, mostly psychological crystallization of an individual's fate. In Clarence's fall from grace and especially in his son's consequent habitual timidity, Updike finds suitable subjects, characters who meditate on "the bowfront sideboard with its flaking veneer of curly cherry."

But as the book proceeds toward the final part of the century, Updike seems at sea in the world of condoms and Uzis and soundbytes. The cult's beliefs and Clark's submission to Jesse, the group's David Koresh-like leader, are unconvincing, and the conversion itself is passed over. "Clark could not remember when he had decided to believe in Jesse," Updike writes. "The big man had just stepped into him like a drifter taking over an empty shack." Compared with Updike's almost Jamesian delineating of Clark's great-father's loss of faith, this evasion at the end leaves a reader wondering whether Updike's heart is still in the book, and whether he can manage to care about these contemporary characters. --Salonl

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