In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike
In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike
List: $27.50 | Sale: $19.25
Club: $13.75

In the Beauty of the Lilies

Author: John Updike

Narrator: Jason Culp

Unabridged: 20 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/28/2020


Synopsis

Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows readers an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the Moving Picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.

About The Author

JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.


Reviews

The plot of "In the Beauty of the Lilies" is as ambitious as the title itself, and in the hands of a lesser author, I daresay the story would've run out of steam by page 30. But this is Updike, an author who could write riveting and gorgeous VCR instruction manuals. The book's scope is grand. It foll......more

Goodreads review by Kuszma

Történelemlecke, ahogy az amerikai nagyepika mesterei szokták volt csinálni. Négy generációban átfogott történelmi idő, a huszadik század újvilági krónikája, némi keleti part, némi nyugati part, no meg persze az álmos középső megyék. Mindez összefonódó arcképekben bemutatva. Hadd mutassam be hát a s......more

Goodreads review by Shane

A door stopper of a book that I kept ploughing through as the author was none other than John Updike (branding helps!); and after ploughing through the first 50 pages, I’m glad I stayed. The novel covers four generations and the middle 80 years of the 20th century in America. Patriarch Clarence Wilmo......more

Goodreads review by Timothy

One of Updike's finest. The thread running through four generations is the inability to maintain a faith, the proliferation of doubt. Even in the end, the resolve of unsupported faith fails the believer. One cannot speed-read Updike. Anyone who tells you they breezed through this book (or many of Upd......more


Quotes

“Dazzling . . . a book that forces us to reassess the American Dream and the crucial role that faith (and the longing for faith) have played in shaping the national soul.”—The New York Times
 
“Stirring and captivating and beautifully written . . . This is the Updike of the Rabbit books, who can take you uphill and down with his grace of vision, his gossamer language, and his merciful, ironic glance at the misery of the human condition.”—The Boston Globe

“Updike’s genius, his place beside Hawthorne and Nabokov have never been more assured.”—George Steiner, The New Yorker