In the Beauty of the LiliesIn the Beauty of the Lilies
Title rated 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 6 ratings(6 ratings)
Book, 1997
Current format, Book, 1997, 1st Ballantine Books trade ed, Available now.Book, 1997
Current format, Book, 1997, 1st Ballantine Books trade ed, Available now. Offered in 0 more formatsThrough four generations--from Clarence Wilmot, a lapsed minister-turned-encyclopedia salesman, in 1910, to the present-day--one family pursues the American obsession with God and the unreal world of the motion picture
A critically acclaimed novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer traces one family's profound journey over four generations and across the spiritual landscape of twentieth-century America. Reprint.
In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from “the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal.” His son, Teddy, becomes a mailman who retreats from American exceptionalism, religious and otherwise, into a life of studied ordinariness. Teddy has a daughter, Esther, who becomes a movie star, an object of worship, an All-American goddess. Her neglected son, Clark, is possessed of a native Christian fervor that brings the story full circle: in the late 1980s he joins a Colorado sect called the Temple, a handful of “God’s elect” hastening the day of reckoning. In following the Wilmots’ collective search for transcendence, John Updike pulls one wandering thread from the tapestry of the American Century and writes perhaps the greatest of his later novels.
A critically acclaimed novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer traces one family's profound journey over four generations and across the spiritual landscape of twentieth-century America. Reprint.
In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from “the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal.” His son, Teddy, becomes a mailman who retreats from American exceptionalism, religious and otherwise, into a life of studied ordinariness. Teddy has a daughter, Esther, who becomes a movie star, an object of worship, an All-American goddess. Her neglected son, Clark, is possessed of a native Christian fervor that brings the story full circle: in the late 1980s he joins a Colorado sect called the Temple, a handful of “God’s elect” hastening the day of reckoning. In following the Wilmots’ collective search for transcendence, John Updike pulls one wandering thread from the tapestry of the American Century and writes perhaps the greatest of his later novels.
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- New York : Fawcett Books, 1997, c1996.
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