GRADUALLY, and with the apparent ease which has been the mark of his literary career, the urbane and wise John Updike has told the story of American middle class humane, often knowing narratives. His work has a refined detachment; the benevolent Updike twill sigh with his characters, but he seldom weeps with them. While other writers have stormed band suffered, this most religious of novelists quickly acquired and perfected a voyeuristic rather than confessional tone. His new novel, In The Beauty of The Lilies (Hamish Hamilton, £16 in UK), is an oddity, and even by a writer of Updike's known versatility and occasional uneveness, is something of a sore thumb.
Four long chapters, which are more like novellas, unite to form the story of an American family over four generations. Updike begins his tale in 1910, in Paterson, New Jersey, with the Reverend Clarence Wilmot about to experience a familiar Updike condition, a loss of faith. The opulent formality of the language in this opening sequence is both seductive and irritating. It is also has with the customary physicality of his prose. Clarence, "a tall, narrow chested man of forty four, with a drooping sand coloured moustache and a certain afterglow of masculine beauty, despite a vague look of sluggish unhealth", is feeling "the last particles of his faith leave him". His uncertainty extends beyond religious issues: Clarence is uncertain, full stop. Hostage to a mind "like a many legged, wingless insect that had long and tediously been struggling to climb up the walls of a slick walled porcelain basin", Clarence is troubled. Countering his doubts is the staunchly robust belief of Stella, his larger than life wife.
When Clarence loses his voice mid sermon, Stella stands in and happily summons up her Southern rhetoric and her own vast, unquestioningly comfortable faith. Not content to continue preaching words he no longer believes in, Clarence finally exchanges the Bible for another form of new testament and embarks on a new career as a most unlikely encyclopaedia salesman. It is a mark of Updike's determination that the fey, ineffectual Clarence continues to live on in this lumbering saga long after he quietly "checks out" - as his elder, more vulgarised New York son observes - of this world.
Clarence's absence becomes much larger than his presence. His son Teddy, "had trouble holding in his mind . . . his father's death, his eternal absence. He kept half expecting time to be reversed and, Father to walk in the door and take charge again in his wry, slender, soft spoken way. The completeness with which his father had been erased from the earth bore for Teddy the force of a miracle."
Yet even in this slow moving opening section. Updike reveals an uncharacteristic hastiness not to be confused with urgency. It quickly becomes obvious that history and the movies are going to be playing an even bigger role in the narrative than the characters. As for the religious aspects well, Updike has always been good on religion better, possibly, than on sex (Updike understands sex is more tied up with self with love). However, in these areas, Updike's Roger's Version (1986), a vastly superior novel, is far more convincing.
Still, Clarence's crisis of religion draws one into a narrative which from the outset has echoes of E.L. Doctorow and John Irving two writers one would never previously have associated with Updike. The historical novel, with its smack of newsreel, headline and researcher's notebook, herding the characters along like so many sheep, is a risky form. In this case, Updike permits landmark events in American history and cinema to act as signposts.
While Clarence bows out, Stella has the substance to stay around, and in many ways she provides much of the backbone of a novel, that races through the century. It might be a strength, but it is also a weakness to have to rely on long lived characters as a way off achieving some semblance of narrative cohesion. There are many doubts and fears stalking this, bloated book, and many of them result in technical shortcomings.
Teddy, Clarence's son, is one of Updike's most sympathetic characters. Teddy quickly develops and never loses the ability to empathise; if losing religion helped destroy his father, Teddy chooses to distance himself from God. Watching his salesman father, he sees Clarence's humiliation as a worm, "a parasite growing larger and larger". Updike's portrait of the growing boy and the young man he becomes is not only the best, most atmospheric part of this novel, but also represents Updike at his finest. Teddy, the second son with a crass, almost cliched elder brother and a "wised up strawberry blonde" sister born street wise, has a sharp sense of his own limitations: "He knew from school that he was cautious and underdeveloped: all around him in the halls and on the asphalt were the click and flash of real knives, real loves, boys and girls who really did it, kids equipped to play the real game. this game of manhood and womanhood and grabbing your piece of the world. He wasn't equipped, he was still curled inward, collecting innocent things - stamps from foreign countries that gave pieces of paper the power to fly around the globe.
Quiet, calm and very moving, Teddy's story is an account of a gentle life, deliberately avoiding risks. A first romance leads him to a safe marriage with the earthy, authoritive and handicapped Emily. Later, in one of the most powerful moments in a novel of few such episodes, Emily, middle aged wife and mother, remarks to her teenage daughter, Essie (later Alma, a movie star) of her marriage with Teddy: "He needed me, for a time - he needed a woman, and I was the least threatening he, could find. I dare say he doesn't dislike me, still. But he's a careful man, your dad. It's as if after whatever it was that happened he just wants to get through this vale of tears with - what did they used to call it during the war? - minimal damage. It's as if he won't give God any satisfaction."
Stella, now a grandmother Teddy and Emily, and Emily's old dad, the gardener, are expected to carry the narrative as Updike prepares to hazard it on the ridiculous Essie and her ambitions. Shea enters the story as a baby whose physical perfection is both a joy and a painful reminder to Emily of her own crippled foot.
With Essie, the novel collapses into a satirical study of a person without a heart. Not even Updike seems convinced, and certainly not engaged, as Essie, fuelled by what her gay cousin Patrick detects as "very charming, innate exhibitionism", begins her long climb to the sleazier regions of Hollywood via modelling underwear and advertising various foodstuffs. Weaker still is the closing section. in which Essie's doomed, loser son and convert to a crazy religious sect, dies a hero in a shoot out with the FBI.
History and Hollywood, too many facts, and the greedy wish to chronicle a century through one family: it all leaves one wondering at the strengths and weaknesses of a lopsided novel which is both graced and flawed by the struggle between the formidable best of John Updike and some of the worst turns he has ever taken in an outstanding career.
