In the Beauty of the Lilies. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 26, 1996 by James Gardner

JUST as the staunchest Anglophiles are invariably the English, so no one is quite as fascinated by America as Americans themselves. Our novelists love to send their characters across the great expanse of this continent to find themselves and discover what it means to be American. Their frequent accounts of the Civil War are not mere historical novels, as a comparable novel might be in another culture: these are attempts to define what we are today and how we became that way. Russians like Gogol and Dostoyevsky may meditate on the soul of the Slavic people, but they never make that the overriding point of their fiction. The French, Germans, and British are far more interesting in disparaging one another than in defining themselves. By contrast, we expect our novelists, especially our male novelists, to take on the great theme that is our nation.

John Updike, in his undemonstrative way, is as consumed by this grand ambition as anyone, and never more so than in his latest novel. As his Rabbit novels sought to invoke the recent history of this country through the life of a single man, so In the Beauty of the Lilies seeks to refract the American Experience through four generations of a single family. It begins with Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian clergyman who loses his faith in the first scene of the book, quits his ministry, and takes to selling encyclopedias in an uphill struggle to feed his good-sized family. Of his two sons, the fast-talking Jared fights in the First World War before becoming a successful businessman, and Teddy, the younger son and focus of the second part of the novel, rises more humbly through the ranks of his local post office. His marriage to Emily brings forth Essie, the subject of the third part, who becomes a movie star in the Fifties and early Sixties. Her only child, Clark, the focus of the fourth and final part of the novel, is a mild-mannered Hollywood child who grows up in the Sixties, does the drug thing in the Seventies, tries screenwriting in the Eighties, and finds religion in the Nineties.

Updike has written a good book, which is to say that it functions as fiction and that it can be read with pleasure. His use of language is always imaginative and not infrequently achieves the effects that he seeks. The characters are always likable and sometimes well-drawn, especially minor ones like Jared, his son Patrick, and Essie's brother Danny. The main problem with the book is its structure. The generational novel, of course, is familiar territory, having been mined by everyone from Dickens and Trollope to Mann and Galsworthy. But unlike these predecessors, Updike opts for the modernistic ploy of four essentially disconnected narratives that read like four novellas. There is no essential theme that runs throughout and links the four parts, so that the overall structure seems arbitrary and unglued.

The other problem with the book is that Updike is playing to his strengths, without confronting his weaknesses. His characters all seem to be essentially the same pale and slightly chinless person in different guises, and that character, we may surmise, is always a variation on Mr. Updike himself. Whereas Updike displays considerable skill in discovering telling and beautiful details, he is often guilty of overkill and indiscriminateness. And the frequent historical details have all the excitement of file footage in a down-market documentary: "It was the year a ship called the Lusitania was sunk in big headlines." "In late May, a young Minnesotan named Charles Lindbergh . . ."

What Updike is not generally adept at is the development of plot. He seems to have bought into the modernist post-Jamesian canard that plot is an inconsequential ornament to a novel, whose main business is the development of character, the discussion of a theme or doctrine, or the exploration of forms. His plots tend to fall into one of two categories, either the examination of character, as in the Rabbit novels, or a kind of crazed, excessive, and unbelievable story-line as in The Coup or in Brazil. In the present work, with its four novellas bound as one, there is very little in the way of compelling narrative. Though the conclusion, which takes place at a David Koresh - style religious compound, is very well done as pure narrative -- in fact the best eight pages of the book -- one rues the absence of such skills elsewhere.

Finally there is a whiff of bad faith, a tremor of insincerity that is never quite absent from this novel. It is too much what one expects in the quality-lit business. Mr. Updike serves up the expected dollop of tastefully recherche metaphors and modernistic ploys and observations, which are always somehow a little less observant than they sound. In short, Mr. Updike has tried to write a postmodern novel that sounds the way postmodern novels sound when they sound like postmodern novels. In the Beauty of the Lilies proves, between the lines, that John Updike has the talent to create a unified novel with a compelling narrative line and characters that really live. Unfortunately that is a talent which, thus far, he seems never fully to have employed.