The Dewey Decimal Novel

...In the Beauty of the Lilies is a collaboration between the novelist and the archives...

...And it carries on with 80 years worth of lists of movies and movie stars, radio and television shows, architecture and artifacts, patent medicines and drug store paraphernalia, women's fashions and cigarette brands from Old Golds and Luck-ies to charcoal-filtered Herbert Tarey-ton's and low-tar Merits...

...Along with God, Hollywood is a running theme of this family saga that carries us in its sometimes tiresome way from 1910, when Clarence Wilmont, minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, gave up on God, to just the other day when his great grandson Clark went up in the flames of the Temple of True and Actual Faith, a Branch Davidian-style cult commune in Colorado: "The plan, approved by the Attorney General's office in Washington, called for the vehicles to approach the Temple close enough for grenade launchers to fire, through windows and holes broken in the walls, packets of the chemical agent CS"—and so forth...

...In 1959, the year she made Cream Cheese and Caviar, with Paul Newman, Essie-Alma birthed Clark, a wanderer who, under the assumption he is being taken home by a cute girl to get laid, winds up in the Temple of True and Actual Faith...

...His growing-up years, Updike does not fail to notify us, coincided with the U.S...

...If the new Updike sounds like one of those movie chronicles that use falling calendar sheets or flashes of newsreels to keep the audience on track, that's in line with the subject...

...the inventories keep coming...

...Bell Laboratories demonstrated a system for transmitting color pictures by 'television.'" And that's not all...

...And he does an amusing turn, making up titles of Essie's movies and tossing them in along with the real things...

...You can't accuse Updike of not reading the paper...

...You remember Alma DeMott: She was the first one to kiss a black man on screen and to show a flash of forbidden flesh...

...It is, he assures a prospective customer, "a down-to-earth encyclopedia, written and edited to patriotic native tastes and yet containing all the world's essential knowledge...

...Teddy begets Essie not long after John Ford makes The Black Watch starring Myrna Loy as the glamorous female Mah-di who dreams of conquering India...

...But if you want to know what folks in their circumstances and eras were wearing and smoking, this is the place to look...

...So now you know why this book is almost 500 pages long...

...John the Baptist, the white wedding-cake tower of City Hall, the fantastical varicolored Flemish facade of the Post Office, and the ribbed dome, not 10 years old, of the Passaic County Court House, upon whose columned cupola a giant gesturing woman persistently kept her balance...

...Along the way there are other Wil-monts: brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins...

...Senate's rejection of the League of Nations, Lenin's creation of the Third Communist International and, most significant for the movie-moved Wilmonts, the formation by D.W...

...Scholl's variously shaped pads mounted on yellow cardboard, and its solemn ministering to the nether parts with Ex-Lax and sanitary napkins and belts and red rubber douche syringes, anti-itch powders and—a new thing—Trojan prophylactics, made in New Jersey and stored well out of sight, in their little tins like those that house Zymole Trochees...

...None makes much of an impact, and several—like the Cold Warrior who might work for the CIA and the New York City homosexual who introduces Essie to the finer things—seem borrowed...

...Essie, as daring as Teddy is timid, actually makes it to Hollywood, the family's inherited dreamworld, changes her name and becomes a star, playing opposite imaging idols like Gary Cooper and Clark Gable...

...In Hollywood, the first Academy Awards went to Wings and Emil Jannings and 22-year-old Janet Gaynor, who starred in three films that year...

...On the very first page you get the feeling it is an upscale guide to Paterson, New Jersey, circa 1910: "From this height the human eye could discern the strip of brick mills clustering about the Falls and its three millraces designed by Pierre L'En-fant, the dour but majestic brownstone spire of Father William Dean McNulty's Cathedral of St...

...Clarence's crisis of faith is connected to economic conditions in the early years of the century, with strikes agitating the mill towns and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood taking on the corporation goons and the respectables of the American Federation of Labor...

...So it's back to God for the Wilmonts...

...The young Teddy wears out several jobs, including one at Addison's Drug Store, a place as stuffed with goods as this sentence: "The drug store was comforting in its abundance, its stocks of head anointments from Tupelo Hair Restorer and Dandruff Cure (with a haunting insignia, of a profiled woman whose long hair was twisted to form the horns of a crescent moon) to Wildroot Cream Oil and Fitch's Shampoo, its foot soothers from Fairyfoot (Stops Bunion Pain) to Dr...

...Griffith, Mary Pick-ford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin of United Artists...

...For much of the way I found the scenery, which is treated with considerable affection, more engaging than the people, toward whom Updike takes a somewhat impersonal approach...

...There are several pages more in that every-thing's-up-to-date-at-Addison's vein...

...These background noises tend to drown out Cla-rence's dreary post-ministerial career as a door-to-door drummer for The Popular Encyclopedia...

...Henry Ford signed an agreement to build a factory in the Soviet Union that would produce 100,000 automobiles a year...

...At one point a whole year is scrolled off without much editing: In May of 1929, we learn, Charles Lindbergh was married "at the bride's home in Englewood, New Jersey...

...I did not find Clark's conversion much more enthralling than great granddad's deconversion, but to end things off with both bangs and whimpers, Updike provides a grippingly imagined climactic scene from inside Armageddon...

...It's a celebration of trademarks...

...In Chicago, Al Capone was jailed for carrying a gun, and in Washington oil tycoon Harry Sinclair was jailed for contempt of Senate, since he had refused five years before to answer questions about his role in the Teapot Dome Scandal...

...Whether all the verisimilitude is in the service of the characters or they are there to serve Updike's social history of almost a century of Americana, I am not sure...

...In The Beauty of the Lilies is very much about the movies...

...Yes, despite his conscientiousness, Clarence is a bore...

...What is more, he begets Teddy, who is even less interesting...

...Maybe you caught Alma in The Last Time We Saw Topeka, with Dan Dailey, Vera-Ellen, Oscar Levant, Kathryn Grant and Georges Guetary...

...Updike's account of her rise is a touch familiar, the age of the studios and mogul-dom having been so heavily celebrated and mocked in both fiction and nonfic-tion, but he writes it much better than most...

...Teddy grows up into a soft, scared man who manages to resist every opportunity offered him until he finally settles contentedly into a postman's route in Basingstoke, Delaware...