Though The John Updike Society was formed fewer than seven months ago and launched with only 35 members, we’ve hit the 100 mark with the addition of Liliana Naydan, a doctoral candidate at SUNY-Stony Brook.

“I became interested in Updike a few years ago,” Naydan writes, “after studying his work with my now dissertation director, Prof. Stacey Olster (editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Updike). My dissertation, titled Fictions of Faith: American Literature, Religion, and the Millenium, includes a chapter on Updike (as well as Philip Roth and Don DeLillo).”

Her chapter on Updike considers “how Updike’s understanding of faith transforms on the eve of the second millennium. I argue that in In the Beauty of the Lillies Updike attempts to bridge apparent divide that fanatical believers, especially early fundamentalists, created between believing in God and embracing the developments of the 20th century as fruitful, not mere signs that an increasingly immoral American nation is rapidly devolving in the face of a fast-approaching, apocalyptic end.  I consider Updike’s earlier works, especially the Rabbit tetralogy, proposing that Updike’s focus in it is on the distinction between faith and good works as means by which to attain salvation.  In the Rabbit novels, only true faith appears to have the power to redeem man.  But in In the Beauty of the Lilies, Updike comes to distinguish between different kinds of faith, and he critiques religious fanaticism, specifically as it has emerged in the latter part of the 20th century.  Even though a fanatic’s faith is true, the intensity of that true belief creates the potential to transcend the bounds of what Updike views as characteristically good. Ultimately, I suggest that Updike comes to advocate for justification through temperance by way of his allusions to biblical and cinematic narratives.  He makes reference to the biblical Book of Esther, which suggests that God exists in the world even in the absence of clear evidence of His existence.  More to the point, he turns to Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) for his key message of temperance in all things.”