In the Beauty of the Lilies

Overview

John Updike's novel opens in 1910 with Clarence Wilmot, a New Jersey minister who quietly loses his belief in God and drifts instead toward the flickering comfort of the picture house. That single crisis of faith becomes the hinge for a much longer family history, as Updike follows Clarence's descendants across most of the twentieth century.

Clarence's son Teddy grows into an unremarkable mail carrier, deliberately choosing a small, uneventful life over any grand American ambition. Teddy's daughter Esther takes the opposite path entirely, rising to Hollywood stardom and becoming an idol in her own right, adored the way earlier generations might have adored a saint. The novel then turns to her overlooked son Clark, who inherits an intense religious hunger that skips a generation and pulls the family's story back toward its origins.

By the 1980s, Clark's search for meaning leads him into a small, isolated Colorado religious group awaiting an apocalyptic reckoning. Across four generations, Updike uses one family's shifting relationship to belief, fame, and ordinary life as a lens on the larger spiritual restlessness of twentieth-century America.

Belief, Spectacle, and the American Century

The novel is less interested in doctrine than in the shapes that longing takes once traditional faith recedes. Clarence's lost churchgoing is replaced by movie screens; Esther's stardom turns ordinary fame into a kind of secular worship; Clark's fervor curdles into extremism. Updike structures the book as a generational relay, letting each Wilmot inherit some displaced version of the last one's need for transcendence, whether that need is answered by God, celebrity, or a charismatic sect.

Published late in Updike's career, the novel is often read as one of his more ambitious late works, using a single family to survey how American public life — movies, media, fame, and fringe religion — absorbed the emotional functions once held by organized faith. The Colorado sect that closes the story, with its handful of self-declared "elect" anticipating a final judgment, brings the family's arc from institutional religion to something more isolated and dangerous, closing a loop the novel opens with Clarence's pulpit.

Why In the Beauty of the Lilies Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel have centered on its frank treatment of religion and its consequences, including a clergyman's public loss of faith, a family's drift through irreligion and celebrity culture, and its unflinching depiction of a violent, extremist religious sect in the closing chapters. Sexual content involving the Esther storyline and passages describing the sect's demise have also drawn scrutiny from those who consider the material inappropriate for younger or general readers. In the records tracked by this catalog, the novel has been the subject of a challenge in 1 state and 1 school district.