Faith and the cinema
Anita Brookner
IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES by John Updike Hamish Hamilton, £16, pp. 491 Updike re-invents himself, or perhaps it is age that re-invents him. In this impressive but troubled novel the tender gusto that his readers have come to expect is missing, replaced by a sonorous but hasty narrative that deals with nothing less than a problem that has been biding its time since the paradisaical years of the late Fifties and early Sixties, years that Updike himself did so much to define. The problem is that of faith, its disastrous loss and its no less disastrous acquisition in the apocalyptic Nineties, and the message is bleak, since those who possess it lose it and those who acquire it go mad. It is just possible to discern traces of the old hedonism behind this summation, but there is anger too, amply bolstered by quotations from the more extreme verses of Ezekiel and Revelation. These fearful words are scattered freely throughout the text, prompting one to wonder how any of Updike's characters came to inherit such obloquy. Jesus puts in few appearances. God is centre stage.
Updike is a religious man, but he is also a novelist: his message is embedded in an epic story of a middle-class American family, the Wilmots, and is expanded by a history of the cinema, a metaphor for what Updike himself has called the pious simplicity of the early days and its descent into the technological perversity of the present. It comes as no surprise, but as a final irony — the only irony in the entire novel — that Teddy Wilmot is able to watch his grandson's demise in a Waco- style religious commune on television. Clark Wilmot, or Esau, has drifted into religion out of inertia. Given a gun, and told to use it, he blasts his way into the next world. Unfortunately, he takes others with him.
The Wilmots are likeable people. Their story almost has the down home sweetness of Updike's suburbia, or would have, were it not for their inevitable loss of innocence. The plot of the novel is simplicity itself. Four generations of Wilmots, from Paterson, New Jersey, and later Basingstoke, Delaware, survive the century, though damaged in various ways. The Reverend Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, loses his faith with dramatic suddenness in 1910, and becomes an encyclopaedia salesman. His unpromising son Teddy, the most sympathetic charac- ter, begets Esther, who makes the transi- tion from cinema-goer to star, and is the mother of Clark, who, not surprisingly, begets no one. The style ranges from pon- derous to faux-naif: an all-inclusive love of America and American artefacts co-exists, somewhat uneasily, with the withdrawal of God's love, as if the former were a humble substitute, or consolation, for that quietus or fulfilment that the deity dispenses or withholds, according to no known design. The cosiness that Clarence's unquestioning wife finds in worship is the same cosiness that is broadcast in her favourite radio programmes, or in the wholesome films to whose attractions the entire family succumbs. The American world is user- friendly and minutely detailed, but the great tragedy persists: as on Dover Beach, the melancholy long withdrawing roar can still be heard.
All this is accomplished in linear narra- tive without tricksy recourse to parallel or anterior fictions. If reference to another work is required, as it so often is when the Reverend Clarence searches numbly through his library, it is given with full title and attribution, as in a bibliography. This plain speaking is of a piece with the integri- ty of the first Wilmot, who felt his faith desert him so abruptly, and who, rather than go through the motions, as the elders of his church urged him to do, reverted to the faintly dishonourable status of the secular second-rater, seeking refuge from his unsold encyclopaedias in the primitive movie houses of the period.
The same integrity, and a simpler tone, informs the unspectacular life of his son Teddy, but is lost when Teddy's daughter Essie almost wins a beauty contest, learns to smile and pout for the cameras, and, as Alma DeMott, becomes a big star. Her early years in New York, in a room at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, allows Updike a nostalgic reference to his earlier style: his jeunes fines en fleur, however, are confined to a single impeccable paragraph. The films in which Alma appears are rushed past us, as if there were no time to lose. Enormous research has gone into this and is acknowl- edged in a further bibliography: not for the novelist the simple pleasure of sitting in the dark.
Essie, or Alma, never takes the blame for her mistakes — her generously distributed favours, her feckless marriages and divorces — because she knows that God loves her. This would be the most deadly of delusions were it not for the persistence of the original faithful Wilmot gene, now seen to be overshadowed by the desire to give good performances. Through facelifts and changes of hair colour Essie is strangely incorruptible, or perhaps she is simply without affect, like her son Clark, who combines worldliness and other-worldliness by becoming the public relations mouth- piece for a crazed religious outfit led by one Jesse Smith. A feeling of sickness steals over the reader, and the writer, as this particular adventure reaches its conclu- sion. Updike oddly loses his habitual sure- footedness, retrieving it in the gabbled monologue of the leader of the Temple of True and Actual Faith, whose adherents are beginning to speak in tongues just before they reach eternity. The uncanny similarity between Jesse's outpourings and the Book of Revelation will not be lost on the reader. The ultimate sentence of this long, perhaps over-long, book consists of a mere two words. Further commentary is judged to be redundant.
`If God were too eager to please, who would worship Him?' This is said either in bitterness or acceptance. Both conditions are present in the novel, which is, finally, a success. But the reader will hardly be conscious of closure once the last page is turned. We may reject Updike's distress, which is entirely genuine. Few of us will not claim some acquaintance with it.
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