John Updike is an odd duck among novelists: a bourgeois golfer, a non- dove during Vietnam, a conservative who writes beautifully about sex, and, most of all, a believer. “I was, by upbringing, a Lutheran,” he wrote in his 1989 memoir, Self-Consciousness. “Faith alone, faith without any false support of works, justified the Lutheran believer.”
The first protagonist of his new novel is a Presbyterian, the Rev. Clarence Wilmot. One hot late spring day in Paterson, N. J., Wilmot suddenly “felt the last particles of his faith leave him.” A graduate of Princeton Seminary, Wilmot is an intellectual who read the doubters but still believed — and then, many years later, suddenly doesn’t: “The fault was in himself. Not Darwin or Nietzsche or Ingersoll or scientific materialism with all its thousandfold modern persuasive corroborations was to blame for his collapse, this invasion of his soul by the void: The failure was his own, an effeminate yielding where a virile strength was required. Faith is a force of will whereby a Christian defines himself against the temptations of an age.”
These temptations were great, even in 1910, when the novel begins. Wilmot leaves the church, becomes a half-hearted encyclopedia salesman, falls ill — and we’re off on an eight-decade family saga across America from Paterson to Basingstoke, Delaware, to the hills of Hollywood and the ski slopes of Colorado.
The temptation to which Wilmot surrenders, the temptation to disbelieve, may be due to God’s isolation from America — an idea that has concerned Updike fro m the very beginning of his career as a writer. His new novel, his seventeenth, is titled In the Beauty of the Lilies (Knopf, 528 pages, $ 25.95). Updike h as alluded to Julia Ward Howe’s phrase before, in a passage in Self-Conscious ness in which he discusses his early writing: “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea — this odd and uplifting line from among the many odd lines of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ seemed to me, as I set out, to summarize what I had to say about America, to offer itself as the title of a continental magnum opus of which all my bo oks, no matter how many, would be mere installments, mere starts at the hymning of this great roughly rectangular country severed from Christ by the breadth of the sea.”
In the Beauty of the Lilies is, in some ways, the fulfillment of a lifetime project, a novel about American faith — about losing it or ignoring it or thinking oneself satisfied without it. The subject matter is certainly ample grist for a miller of Updike’s prodigious talent, and it’s a good novel. But it’s not an entirely satisfying one, partly because Updike has little to say about faith that’s new and powerful, partly because this book (unlike the Rabbit novels) is more contrived than passionate, and partly because the multi- generational saga doesn’t seem to be Updike’s best medium-there are too many diffuse main characters.
In the Beauty of the Lilies is really four distinct books. In the first, Clarence Wilmot loses his faith — a deeply textured, dark and wonderful tale which, doubled in length, would have made a very fine novel on its own. In the second, Clarence’s son Teddy moves to Basingstoke, wounded by his father’s collapse and afraid of life (like an Anne Tyler character) but finding his place as a mailman. In the third, Teddy’s beautiful daughter Essie leaves Delaware and becomes a movie star. This is the thinnest part of the book, begging unfortunate comparison to Gore Vidal. Finally, Essie’s son Clark bums around Hollywood and Colorado, then finds his calling in an apocalyptic cult led by a David Koresh-like religious fanatic who brings the’ theme full circle, reminding his followers as the police close in, “Faith, faith is the jewel, the pearl of great price.”
Genes pull the stories together, but the movies provide the real glue. The book begins with Mary Pickford making a film for D. W. Griffth in Paterson. Later, encyclopedia salesman Clarence deserts “the sunny harsh streets of door- to-door rejection for the shadowy interiors of those moving-picture houses that, like museums of tawdry curiosities, opened their doors during the day.” Teddy’s wife-to-be is described as having eyes with “bigger whites than those, of ordinary girls: they were the eyes of the movie stars Gloria Swanson or Lillian Gish on posters outside the Roxie.” And Essie (renamed “Alma DeMott” by Harry Cohn, real-life tyrant of Columbia Pictures during Hollywood’s golden age) makes movies by the dozen.
In the Hollywood section, Updike gets star-struck himself and wanders off- course. He indulges himself making up movie titles. Essie appears in Safe at Your Peril, Colored Entrance, Cream Cheese and Caviar (with Paul Newman), and Uh-Oh, My Show Is Slipping (with Jerry Lewis and Jack Lemmon, between whom we’re told there was “an utter lack of chemistry”). She’s considered for ” a television adaptation of Memento Mori,” Muriel Spark’s fine novel about old folks. Updike insinuates Essie into real movies and has her steamed up because she wasn’t “considered for the Natalie Wood part in The Searchers.”$ N She makes films with Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby (a genius for whom Updike shows the proper respect), and Clark Gable, who “had loved Lombard; in a Hollywood that had matched him with its every giantess from Jean Harlow to Ava Gardner, Lombard, all soft gay golden toughness, a foul-mouthed publicity hound and frenetic practical joker, had been his heart’s match,” etc., etc.
Essie’s wandering son Clark — who, like his grandfather, may have deserved a whole novel of his own — can be forgiven for not being movie-obsessed like his relatives: This morn was on location all the time and generally considered him a nuisance. But Updike gives him the best movie line of all, spoken in his head, during his cult’s fiery demise: “He heard a noise, soft but pointed, over where the cups and plates used to be: a cup settling on a saucer or a twig snapping in the fire or the bolt of a rifle being stealthily socketed. $ IGo ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.” That’s Bogart, of course, in Casablanca. And Clark, finding the faith that Clarence lost, is consumed.
“Then,” writes Updike, “there was no more pain, but for the briefest burning edge, like the crinkly orange margin that consumes the paper of a cigarette in advance of the growing tobacco ash.”
It’s such a pleasure to watch Updike at work that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s doing. Here’s his description of a chair lift, geared during a busy day to move too quickly: “The skier in the middle, with no sidebar to grab on to, was especially threatened; three times that morning some little kid failed to get his ass in his slick Gore-Tex jumpsuit up on the seat in time and went sprawling in the slush here at the base, headfirst in the thousand bucks” worth of flashy equipment his parents poured all over him like Technicolor paint.”
And ordnance: “The Ruger’s rear sight was an intricate leaf shape, the front sight a beaded ramp that seemed to Esau, waving the barrel through the window, to swing into its target like a ball of mercury popping to the bottom of a cup.”
And more tobacco: “He snorted, and hot cigarette ash topped into his gray chest hair, sending up a scent of singe.” And more scents:
“It was strange, to be again in a church — its spiky varnished woodwork, its warm haunted smell of flowers and wax and coal-gas and dust.”
And old Jared, in a line with almost too much virtuosity: “His hand on his knee was like tobacco leaves wrapped around chicken bones.”
But this is a book about faith, not language, a book about America’s estrangement from the Christ born across the sea and its yearning for Him. If Teddy hadn’t been so disappointed with God for beating his father down, we can conclude, he might have lived a less constricted life. And if Essie had embraced her faith more forcefully, she might have gone through fewer husbands, created better art, loved her son.
The character who speaks the book’s theme most clearly is the blustery but charitable entrepreneur Mr. Dearholt, pillar of Clarence’s church. When an Italian immigrant woman complains that hard work in the silk mills killed her husband, Dearholt protests,
“‘Work is the way of the country, my good lady. Those afraid of work should have stayed home. . . . We have cleared the way for you! . . . Am I overstepping, Reverend? I mean everything I say kindly, to encourage all of my fellow Americans. Courage and faith, that’s all we need. Faith . . .”
So far away from God, this is a country whose creed requires faith. “My era was too ideologically feeble to wrest [my faith] from me,” Updike wrote in $ ISelf-Consciousness. The current era, where a certain noxious ideology pervades the academy and the pulpit, may be another matter entirely.
James K. (Glassman is a columnist for the Washington Post.
