Novel: In the Beauty of the Lilies

Overview

John Updike follows four generations of the Wilmot family as they move from a rural Pennsylvania beginning into the thrum of mid-20th-century American life. The narrative moves episodically across decades, from the early optimism of the 1910s and 1920s through the dislocations of World War II, the rise of suburbia, and the advent of television and celebrity culture. The title evokes both devotional imagery and the domestic beauty of ordinary life, setting a contrast between spiritual longing and secular spectacle.
Updike centers the novel on spiritual disintegration and cultural transformation, showing how private loss and public change reflect and amplify one another. Scenes shift in time and place but repeatedly return to motifs of faith, image, and the uneasy inheritance parents pass to children. The tone alternates between elegiac reflection and keen observation of American manners and media.

Plot Summary

The story begins with the immigrant ancestor who becomes a minister, a man whose devout faith shapes the family's moral architecture. His son, Mont, is a minister in a declining era of religious certainty; his struggles with reduced congregations and private doubt mark the first generation's crisis. Mont's daughter, Eden, marries and raises children in a more prosperous, image-driven America, and her emotional distance from traditional faith becomes a hinge for later complications.
The novel's most dramatic turn comes with Eden's son, Angel, a sensitive and idealistic man who drifts toward a different kind of devotion. Angel's yearnings, misunderstood by his family, intersect with the growing cult of celebrity and televised spectacle. The final generation confronts fame, childhood loss, and the commodification of wonder, culminating in episodes that force the family to reckon with sacrifice and the costs of cultural assimilation.

Themes and Motifs

A central theme is the decline of religious faith and the rise of simulated transcendence offered by mass media. Updike contrasts church ritual and private prayer with televised sensationalism and celebrity worship, suggesting that a new secular evangelism promises meaning but often hollows it out. The novel also meditates on the persistence of memory and the ways grief is inherited and reshaped by each generation.
Another recurrent motif is images and mirrors: reflections of self and constructed personas. Characters navigate roles imposed by social expectation and the performative demands of public life. Updike explores how Americans substitute spectacle for sacrament, how the luminous surface of culture can both dazzle and desiccate inner life.

Character Focus

Mont Wilmot embodies the old clergy's dignity and wounded pride; his dignified failures and steadfast rituals anchor the family's past. Eden represents a quieter surrender to modern comforts and the compromises of domestic life. Angel, the most poignantly observed figure, carries the novel's emotional weight, his sensitivity makes him vulnerable to both spiritual longing and the coercions of contemporary culture.
Supporting characters, parishioners, broadcasters, and ordinary neighbors, function as mirrors and counters to the Wilmots, illuminating how larger social movements penetrate intimate lives. Updike sketches them with sympathetic acuity, neither idealizing nor dismissing their frailties.

Style and Reception

Updike's prose is richly detailed, precise, and often lyrical, balancing careful description with an undercurrent of moral inquiry. Sentences move with a formal elegance that recalls 20th-century realist traditions while engaging explicitly with mid-century pop culture. The novel received praise for its ambition and moral seriousness even as some critics found its scope diffuse.
The book stands as a meditation on American identity, asking what is lost and what persists when a culture trades ritual for image. It offers both tender scenes of domestic life and a broader critique of the spectacle that reshapes spiritual yearnings into entertainment.