On Line opinion, Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate, recently posted a critical article by Peter Sellick on John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies.
“All the characters love the movies. Indeed Updike gives us a potted history of American movie making. It is obvious that the movies become, to a large extent, a window on reality and that in doing so they displace the key role of the Church of mediating reality. The narratives of Scripture are replaced by those of Bogart and Bacall,” Sellick writes.
“In Lilies Updike gives us a narrative of social, familial and spiritual decline that is associated with the loss of faith. In this he is no romantic, harking back to a lost and idealized Christendom. There has never been a time in which faith has not been fragile and rare. But he charts our time and finds ground to conclude that we are experiencing our very own crisis and that this is demonstrable by the isolation and foundering of the self of which Clark is the end product.”
“Updike gives us a narrative arc in Lilies that follows a family who had experienced a profound loss of faith, a professional churchman, considered, educated, comes to the conclusion that God does not exist. The effect of this event is worked out in the next three generations in detail. It is a convincing narrative. Like the gospels, it is a story that includes verifiable historical events and movements upon which a fictional overlay is placed. For me, the story resonates; I understand the connections that Updike makes. Such a narrative is able to cut through to the truth in a way that sociology finds difficult.”