But then, in the fourth section, the same American furies who combined to bless the child combine again to curse her child, Clark, a casual afterthought of one of her failed marriages. Thus the thematic link to Mary Pickford: in America, the theater has replaced the church, the never-never land of Hollywood’s happy endings has replaced the hope of a Christian heaven, and the movie goer’s passive suspension of disbelief has replaced the religious believer’s active embrace of faith.Įssie never really faces any tough spots, however: the third section of In the Beauty of the Lilies tracks her triumphant career as a Hollywood screen goddess, America’s substitute for the lost God of Christian faith. Faced with his wife’s bitter incomprehension-“Stop this tedious mooning about faith!”-and reduced to selling second-rate encyclopedias door to door, the former Reverend Wilmot finds his only relief in watching movies. The sensation was distinct-a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward.Ĭlarence’s loss of faith and subsequent resignation from his ministry tumbles the family into a financial ruin from which they do not recover for two generations. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. This brief vignette is, literally and symbolically, the spring of all the ensuing action:Īt the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Rev. The problem is that it just does not seem to matter.ĭrawing its title from the last verse of the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” In the Beauty of the Lilies opens with a scene of the movie actress Mary Pickford fainting in the heat of a 1910 spring day in Paterson, New Jersey, while filming D.W. The story is perhaps a little sketchy, as though the book were an abstract for a novel rather than the finished thing, but it is a thoughtful and serious book, in places funny and in places sad, by a thoughtful and serious man, the prose master of his generation. The sixty-three-year-old novelist’s latest work, In the Beauty of the Lilies, spans eight decades, and on this (for Updike) unusually broad canvas it paints a portrait of four generations of an American family and their struggles with the decline of religion. With each new and beautifully written book, the significance of John Updike seems to fade further.
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