In the Beauty of the Lilies [Hardcover]

How to read Updike? What size wheelbarrow to cart even a quarter of his output to your study? Will it be worth the effort, given the views of other prominent writers I hold in high esteem? According to Martin Amis, John Updike "is a psychotic Santa of volubility". Tom Wolfe, meanwhile, is unimpressed by Updike's attitude to the reading public: our tastes have coarsened, apparently, and it's our fault literary novels aren't very successful. As for Gore Vidal, best not go there. What actually persuaded me to buy this novel was a passing reference by an unlikely source, Daniel Dennett. I'm glad I did. It turned out to be a pleasure to read and immensely rewarding.

Alma DeMott, real name Essie Wilmot, is a big Hollywood star. Returning home to Basingstoke, Delaware, she helps out in the family business, her face "innocent of make-up" instead of projected many times life size on the silver screen. The customers don't recognize her. She doesn't seem to mind, and yet invisibility is hardly an asset in her line of work. Updike captures this ambivalence perfectly: "perhaps they were townspeople who, inching through their own lives in that molelike small-town way, assumed that Essie Wilmot had never left."

As a child, a "cosmic attention beat on her skin", and while God "watched her every move" she watched the movies. "In their shining, with their swift-talking barking voices and sharp snagging movements as if by a pair of scissors, the movies took you to an edge but left you safe, all shadows sealed shut inside a happy ending." Grown up and a movie star, she can relive for the camera and live for real her childhood feelings of being special.

You might think that her love of both God and the movies must be insincere at some level - she is a consummate actress after all, who can "cry on cue" - but Updike's great achievement is to have created a complex and entirely convincing character. If you think of religion's longstanding and ironically visceral hatred of the body and all its sensual pleasures, then it seems odd that Essie both loves "her own body, the way it was so taut and flexible" and at the same time believes that "God always answered" her prayers. On stage, after losing to a "pushy little peroxide slut" in a beauty pageant (she doesn't wonder why God failed her then), her emptiness is described in terms Antonio Damasio might use: "For flesh to feel like something good, your spirit has to be up." She is "grateful that her God was a Protestant one, Who gave you credit for some brains and let you work things out for yourself". This is freelance religion, an example of the weathering of the concept of God (here Updike unwittingly anticipates Dennett). People used to believe a lot of things about God; now, it's more about accepting Jesus. Alma, being a big star, naturally cuts out the middle man and deals with the boss direct.

Faith - its presence or absence - is a thread linking each character. Essie wears hers like silk. "She had trouble understanding how people could doubt God's existence: He was so clearly there, next to her, interwoven with her, a palpable pressure". Her own grandfather's faith gets tied in knots and then snaps. He had read too much "Ingersoll, Hume, Darwin, Renan, Nietzsche" but, fittingly in a novel that flits between the movies and God, it was the moment Mary Pickford fainted on screen when "the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot... felt the last particles of his faith leave him." His wife is less than understanding: "a lot of us have doubts, but we just brush them under the table and get on with the job." Except he can't, and he doesn't. Quitting takes enormous courage and is rewarded by a loss of social status and income.

Clarence's atheism - "his terrible sinking, his descent through the shadows of this stifling afternoon into the bottomless, featureless depths of Godlessness" - is, I think, an unintentional caricature. In his study, he finds no comfort in the world's books, which are "boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow." If maggoty books aren't bad enough, Clarence realizes that in "the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value... Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting." Such lurid notions may appeal to a person of faith, but to an atheist this characterization of a godless universe is both risible and offensive. Still, Updike's prose is hugely enjoyable in ways in which polemics and sermons are not - you get a better quality imagery, for a start: a character's "good hand on his knee was like tobacco leaves wrapped around chicken bones". Only occasionally is a metaphor marred by weak philosophy (saying that reality "is a kind of movie the self projects" fits nicely but smacks of the fallacy of the Cartesian theatre).

This is a novel rich in characters and language and ideas and generous in its scope. At either end of the twentieth century are two characters three generations apart. In 1910 Clarence clams up in church, overwhelmed by the "sad pap" he once professed with confidence. In 1990, his great-grandson, Esau, is holed up in a Waco-style cult, and preaches to the police with an exuberance Clarence never had. The difference? Esau "didn't believe all of what he was saying, but he loved the sensation of saying it."

An engrossing novel that captures the spritual, economic, moral turmoil of this century. The book's historical structure struck me as unlike Updike's previous work, but at the same time his historical chronology is unlike anyone else's because of the beauty and precision of his language. I couldn't put it down.