In the Beauty of the Lilies Author:John Updike When Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian clergyman, loses his faith and becomes an encyclopedia salesman, he opens the saga of one American family's twentieth-century relationship with God and all things religious.
Although I found this book very hard to begin, I was by the end so enthralled that I completed the novel in no time flat. A really great portrait of generations of American life.
A wonderful book -- Updike at his best! Updike tracks the fortunes and falls of an American family through four generations and eight decades. In doing so, he tells the story of the whole century as view through the metaphor of the movies.