In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike

First published: 1995 (first pb. in US, 1996)

Type of plot: Family

Time of work: 1910 to 1990

Locale: Paterson, New Jersey; Basingstoke, Delaware; Hollywood, California; and Lower Branch, Colorado

Principal Characters:

• Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister-turned-encyclopedia-salesman in Paterson
• Theodore “Teddy” Wilmot, Clarence’s son, a postman in a small Delaware town
• Esther “Essie” Wilmot, Teddy’s daughter, an actress who takes the screen name Alma DeMott
• Clark DeMott, Esther’s son, called “Esau” by members of the Colorado cult he joins

The Novel

In the Beauty of the Lilies is divided into four sections of roughly similar lengths, each named for one of the novel’s central characters. The third-person narrator of each section has a limited point of view: that is, the narrator knows the thoughts and feelings of the character for whom the section is named.

The “Clarence” chapter begins in 1910 in Paterson, New Jersey. Mary Pickford, the famous actress, is starring in a film being made nearby. It is a warm day, and Pickford faints on the set. At the same moment, a few miles away, Reverend Clarence Wilmot, a socially secure Presbyterian minister, feels “the last particles of his faith leave him . . . a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward.” Clarence finds himself unable to serve a God in whom he no longer believes. Facing social humiliation and risking the loss of means to support his family, Clarence resigns his ministry. Three years later, the economy of Paterson stymied by labor unrest, Clarence ekes out a living peddling The Popular Encyclopedia door-to-door. In seriously reduced circumstances, Clarence finds comfort where he can: at the movies.

The “Teddy” chapter concerns Clarence’s youngest son, named for President Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy, however, lacks Roosevelt’s virility, his can-do spirit; he is quite happy staying out of harm’s way. After Clarence’s death, Teddy, his mother, and his sister are taken in by relatives in Basingstoke, an isolated northern Delaware town. Teddy, just graduated from high school, sees the move as a step down. The locals are “rubes.” Furthermore, there is the problem of what he should “do.” The son of an educated man, it would not do for Teddy to work in the local bottle-cap factory, and when he announces that he does not want to “sell anything, and I don’t want to teach anything . . . and I don’t want to make anything,” the situation looks bleak. Eventually he finds a job in a drugstore, falls in love with Emily Sifford, and winds up working as a postman—a happy niche for Teddy. He marries the physically lame Emily and, at the chapter’s end, walks in on her as she is bent over the crib admiring the physical perfection of their baby girl, Esther. If Teddy’s life is not a picture of domestic bliss, it is nevertheless one of harmony.

Esther, whose family calls her “Essie,” remains a beauty. The third chapter, dedicated to her story, opens with the portrait of a girl full of her own good fortune: “The joy of being herself flooded seven-year-old Essie’s skin; it felt so tight she wanted to scream or laugh out loud.” Her childhood experiences with the magic of cinema seal her fate: Life, for Essie, will be glamorous. Essie’s triumph as second-runner-up in the 1947 Miss Delaware Peach contest leads to photo opportunities. These lead to a long career as a movie star that requires her to shed her name and become “Alma DeMott.” Alma’s acting career is full of valleys and peaks, but “among the many roles that Alma undertook, motherhood proved one of the few for which she was clearly miscast.” Her son Clark, born in 1959, is a trial for Alma, and the news in 1987 that he has joined a Colorado cult comes as a relief.

The novel’s final chapter is Clark’s. The son of Alma and a scriptwriter to whom she was briefly married, Clark has a troubled childhood and adolescence. He lands a job with his great-uncle, Jared, who runs a ski resort in Colorado. There he meets Hannah, with whom he plans to go home for a sexual encounter. Her home turns out to be a commune the members of which belong to a cult, the Temple of True and Actual Faith; its leader, Jesse Smith, believes himself an incarnation of God. Clark joins, finding for the first time a meaningful life in rural Colorado, among Jesse’s misfit cultists. Here Clark is given the name Esau. Things begin to disintegrate when one member shoots at a school bus; federal and state agents, after a lengthy standoff, fire tear gas into the compound. Rather than surrender, Jesse masterminds a mass suicide plan. He and his followers set fire to the Temple and begin distributing poison to other believers and their children. Esau undergoes an epiphany, which he experiences as “a flock of sparkling dark immaterial bubbles” descending into his body, and immediately knows that Jesse must die. In a heroic act, he shoots Jesse. The novel ends with television news anchors showing clips of the story to a transfixed America.

The Characters

One of John Updike’s strengths is his ability to create fully rounded characters who also symbolize larger ideas. The symbolism, however, never overshadows character development, and most readers will not feel as if Updike is using his characters to pursue purely didactic aims. The characters in this novel are fully rounded, but they also represent their eras in American history, particularly as regards the prevailing religious tenor of the times.

Clarence’s loss of faith is partially the result of pressures created by his times; by 1910, it becomes difficult for an educated person to reconcile religious faith with rapid scientific advances and social changes. Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution have made traditional religious accounts of the origin of human beings appear doubtful. Karl Marx’s economic and social theories have argued that religion has historically been used to oppress the working class. Telegraph wires quickly bring news of famines, natural disasters, and armies poised to attack. Clarence finds it difficult to reconcile the idea of a loving God with so much human suffering. The final blow to Clarence’s faith is the rapid proliferation of American popular culture, specifically the developing film industry. As the religious stories and heroes of the past are replaced by inexpensively procured narratives and larger-than-life heroes whose magic is so intoxicatingly present, religious faith for Clarence, as for American society generally, undergoes trauma.

Clarence’s loss of faith, rooted in history, shapes the identity of his descendants. Teddy, in reaction to his father’s emotional and intellectual upheaval, chooses a life of nonconfrontation with the world and God. The house in which Teddy and Emily live symbolizes nicely Teddy’s strategy for dealing with the world: “He liked the way the house seemed to hide, to hang back, between its two imposing neighbors.” Teddy, like his father, lacks faith, but Teddy’s lack of faith stems from loyalty to Clarence rather than any intellectual or emotional crisis. This is not to say that Teddy is untouched by history. Born in the early years of the century, Teddy is too young for World War I, too old for World War II, and as a postman who lucked into a government position before the stock market crash in 1929, mostly insulated from the Great Depression.

Essie, however, is not be satisfied with a life of noninvolvement. As if to make up for her father’s desire to get through life making little trouble, Essie opts for a life in the limelight. Her career as an actress takes her far from Basingstoke and straight into Hollywood, the popular culture capital of America. She also signals a return, in the novel, to religious faith; her faith, however, is not the inward-looking, intellectual Presbyterianism of her paternal forebears, but something worn lightly, a faith tempered by her mother’s Methodism. Essie never wrestles with her religious faith. For her, faith is instinctive: “She had trouble understanding how people could doubt God’s existence: He was so clearly there, next to her, interwoven with her, a palpable pressure, as vital as the sensations in her skin, as dependable as her reflection in the mirror.” Faith—like sex, fame, and money—comes easily to Essie. Born in 1930, she is too young to be adversely affected by the Depression, and she comes of age during the unreflective, sunnily optimistic post-World War II economic boom.

Her energy seems admirable, especially in contrast with the lassitude of her lovable but ineffectual father; nevertheless, her son Clark reacts against the shallowness and heartlessness in her character. A child of rootless California who never knows his father and whose religious training is minimal, young Clark is a drifter attracted to the easy highs of drugs and gorgings of American popular culture. A lost soul, he searches for meaning in life and finds it within the Temple of the True and Actual Faith, with its charismatic father-figure leader Jesse. Clark, a true member of his generation, suffers from a sense of meaninglessness in the radically fragmented American culture of the 1980’s and attaches himself, although with some sense of postmodern irony, to whatever source of meaning he can find.

Critical Context

Throughout his prolific career, especially in A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger’s Version (1986), and S. (1988), Updike has revisited issues surrounding America’s Puritan, Protestant heritage posed over a century earlier by Nathaniel Hawthorne. If Hawthorne recognized the human suffering that Puritanism wrought as a defining characteristic of the American experience, Updike too sees the history of religious faith in America as inextricably interwoven with the nation’s destiny. The Hawthorne parallels in this novel are unmistakable, and the reader will note Updike’s use of the name Esther, echoing Hester from The Scarlet Letter (1850), and also that Clarence’s middle name is Arthur, recalling Arthur Dimmesdale from the same novel.

The literary context of this novel is no more important than the historical. In the spring of 1993, in Waco, Texas, federal authorities stormed the compound of the Branch Davidians, a religious sect led by David Koresh. The deaths of members and their children touched a nerve in America’s conscience. Updike echoes the events in Waco in the novel’s final chapter, leading the reader to wonder to what degree a kind of Puritanical religious intolerance might have been responsible for the tragedy in Waco. In a nation under a constitution guaranteeing religious freedom, but in a nation suspicious of religious heterodoxy, the possibility for such terrifying events, in which the government, the charismatic cult leader, and the culture itself share blame, looms omnipresent.

Sources for Further Study

Bloom, Harold, ed. John Updike: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. A wide-ranging assortment of essays by important critics assessing various aspects of Updike’s work.

The Christian Century. CXIII, April 24, 1996, p. 452. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

Commentary. CI, April, 1996, p. 64. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The Economist. CCCXXXVIII, February 24, 1996, p. 89. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

Greiner, Donald J. Adultery in the American Novel: Updike, James, and Hawthorne. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Explores the Updike-Hawthorne connection in regard to the theme of adultery.

Hunt, George W. John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1980. Examines the important themes that appear throughout ten of Updike’s novels.

London Review of Books. XVIII, March 21, 1996, p. 23. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 28, 1996, p. 3. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

Maclean’s. CIX, February 26, 1996, p. 70. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The Nation. CCLXII, February 12, 1996, p. 25. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

National Review. XLVIII, February 26, 1996, p. 63. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

New Leader. LXXVIII, December 18, 1995, p. 27. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The New Republic. CCXIV, May 27, 1996, p. 29. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

New Statesman and Society. IX, May 3, 1996, p. 37. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

New York. XXIX, January 15, 1996, p. 52. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The New York Review of Books. XLIII, February 29, 1996, p. 4. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, January 28, 1996, p. 9. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The New Yorker. LXXII, March 11, 1996, p. 105. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

Pasewark, Kyle A. “The Troubles with Harry: Freedom, America, and God in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels.” Religion and American Culture 6, no. 1 (Winter, 1996): 1-33. Approaches several of Updike’s most famous books through their portrayal of democracy and spirituality.

Plath, James, ed. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. In this collection of interviews, Updike describes, among other things, the significance of his early exposure to religion and its prominence within his fiction.

Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. A brief, readable survey of Updike’s work.

Time. CXLVII, January 29, 1996, p. 78. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The Wall Street Journal. January 17, 1996, p. A12. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVI, February 4, 1996, p. 1. A review of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

Wood, Ralph C. “Into the Void: Updike’s Sloth and America’s Religion.” The Christian Century (April 24, 1996): 452-457. A major review of In the Beauty of the Lilies exploring Updike’s religious vision.

Yerkes, James, ed. John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999. The definitive collection of articles examining this work and others from a Christian perspective.