The Gimlet Eye

esting 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.

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esting 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.