THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 28, 1996 TAG: 9601290232
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROGER K. MILLER
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES
JOHN UPDIKE
Alfred A. Knopf. 490 pp. $25.95.
John Updike's new novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, is about religion and stardom. As a leading anatomist of the American body politic, he was bound to get around to these subjects sooner or later. Americans have been confusing them for decades - for just about as long a span of time, in fact, as Updike covers in this brilliant work of fiction.
It begins in 1910 in Paterson, N.J., and ends in 1990 in Colorado. In those 80 years Updike chronicles four generations of one family, the Wilmots, as well as an impressive amount of American history, to much of which he gives the needle. Subtly, of course, because this is Updike, but piercingly, too, because the needle has been sharpened by Updike's unusual critical-creative intellect.
There is, for example, the minor but telling character of the Rev. Thomas Dreaver, who appears early in the novel. Dreaver is the ecclesiastical superior to whom the Rev. Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian pastor who has lost his faith, travels one day to declare his apostasy and concomitant decision to quit the pastorate.
Is Dreaver shocked? Does he fear for Wilmot's soul? Does he strip him of his clerical collar forthwith? Not a bit of it. Already, 10 years into the 20th century and in the era of ``modernism,'' Dreaver slickly turns each of Wilmot's doubts into a sign of faith and smooth-talks him into remaining in the pastorate for a probationary year.
Wilmot resignedly submits to this patent flim-flam, but its effects do not last. He leaves when the probationary period is up, taking a series of increasingly unremunerative jobs and languishing unto death in middle age - but not before he discovers and becomes enthralled with the new medium of motion pictures.
The book from then on is dominated by the movies, where nothing has to be what it seems and through which the sort of bamboozlement that Dreaver practiced upon Wilmot is worked upon the national moral, spiritual and intellectual consciousness. Most Americans are willing to be persuaded and, like Wilmot, unable to resist. We like to let ourselves be fooled, and, denied a sense of cosmic immortality by a secularist age, we lust after fame.
The novel is divided into four sections. The second section is given over to Wilmot's son, Teddy, who also is entranced by the movies, seeing in their flickering portrayals of our nightmares proof of his father's conclusion that ``life was endlessly cruel, and there was nobody above to grieve.'' Teddy becomes a mailman in a small town in Delaware and marries a young woman named Emily - two innocent, married lovers of whom the author seems especially fond.
Ted and Emily's daughter, Esther, or Essie, appears destined for the movies from childhood. Updike shifts the point of view slightly in her section, making it not exactly first-person, but as if looking out from inside her childish head. The other children think her stuck-up, but at age 7, Essie knew she wasn't: ``She just was perfect and so glad of it.''
Essie feels a strong connection to the ministerial grandfather she never knew: ``In his unreality he held a promise of lifting her up toward the heavenly realm where movie stars flickered and glowed.'' When she becomes a famous actress under the stage name of Alma DeMott, her grandmother says that Essie's stardom somehow balances out her husband's ``fall.''
The book ends in its own kind of balancing out. The Rev. Clarence Wilmot, who could not keep an intellectualized faith, is crazily mirrored by his great-grandson Clark Demott - Essie's son - who signs on with a loony faith. Seemingly every bizarre dysfunction of every major institution in our national life - media, church, movies, law, family - comes slouching toward Armageddon in a cataclysmic closing worthy of Waco, Texas.
As we ourselves slouch toward the end of the millennium, Updike increasingly emerges as the writer who has shown us where we've been for the last 50 years of it. He has done so much so well for so long - novels, short stories, poetry and criticism. Now, at 63 and approaching his 50th book, he has produced a work of art as fresh and original as anything he did at half that age. MEMO: Roger K. Miller, former book editor for The Milwaukee Journal, is a
free-lance writer in Grafton, Wis.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
John Updike
by CNB