In the beauty of the lilies

Clarke had little suitable parenting apart from occasional visits from his uncle. The following is indicative of the sort of world he was growing up in:

Once, when about sixteen, Clarke had asked his mother why she had married Rex and then stuck with him until 1970, by which time he had become a very pathetic drunk. She had given him a look, like And who the hell are you?, with those famous long eyebrows arched under her cap of carefully tousled platinum hair, and told him calmly "Rex was all cock." Clarke didn't think then or now that this was a suitable thing to say to a son, even a son growing up and accumulating experience of his own.

In Lilies Updike gives us a narrative of social, familial and spiritual decline that is associated with the loss of faith. In this he is no romantic, harking back to a lost and idealised Christendom. There has never been a time in which faith has not been fragile and rare. But he charts our time and finds ground to conclude that we are experiencing our very own crisis and that this is demonstrable by the isolation and foundering of the self of which Clark is the end product.

Certainly Walter, Clark's grandfather on hearing of his death in the fire reflects:

How grieved Dad used to be by the paper, all the terrible items in it, and the world then wasn't anything as bad as it is now.. Simple human decency and self-respect should do it. That's pretty much gone now, with the world so full of handy excuses. Kill a man one day and plead insanity the next.

Has the world gotten worse because of the decline of faith? Sociological analysis may point to some of this but it is a blunt tool because faith cannot be measured and may be only loosely connected to church attendance, the only measurable variable. Nobody sees the secrets of the human heart.

Most people I know, churched or not, are decent and reliable and honest. Those who proclaim atheism are perhaps even better than most because they have actually thought about the question of god. So how do we assess our culture compared to the past and as associated with the decline of the influence of the Church? Perhaps the novelist has more of an answer than the sociologist! While sociology has to deal with statistics, and there is a place for that, the novelist has to weave a believable narrative that has the ring of truth.

Updike gives us a narrative arc in Lilies that follows a family who had experienced a profound loss of faith, a professional churchman, considered, educated, comes to the conclusion that God does not exist. The effect of this event is worked out in the next three generations in detail. It is a convincing narrative. Like the gospels, it is a story that includes verifiable historical events and movements upon which a fictional overlay is placed. For me, the story resonates; I understand the connections that Updike makes. Such a narrative is able to cut through to the truth in a way that sociology finds difficult.

Of course Clark did not necessarily have to turn out to be a lost soul. There are many examples of individuals who survive a childhood lacking in love, but it is hard, and, I think rare. We cannot draw hard causal links in human psychology but we can understand a narrative that makes connections between self knowledge, healthy identity, realistic hopefulness and an accurate anthropology/sociology. We can see the connections between a faith that guards us from idolatry and inhuman outcomes. This is the stuff of art, the stuff of the novel. The hegemony of the empirical method must be challenged; there are other ways to knowledge than testable evidence.

The narrative may be supported by changes in society and our personal experience but it also has to gibe with that branch of philosophy known as the history of ideas. For example, theorists of modernity see a connection between Descartes' cogito that posits all epistemology in the thinking subject. This, it is said, has led to extreme subjectivism, a way of knowing that is cut off from the traditions of knowing represented, for example, by the Church. Jared's axiom "pussy takes and money gives" could only be proclaimed by one whose self is at the centre of life.

Elsie could not have given her body so freely whenever it was needful if she had some idea of the sanctity of marriage and the supreme task of raising the next generation. She could act as she did because she had learnt that she had to do "whatever it takes" to achieve her goals of self aggrandisement and fame. She had inherited Hollywood narcissism.

But then there is a twist towards hopefulness, Clarke, the end product of this family of unbelief, the most hopeless and disoriented, kills the cult leader when he begins shooting the women and children to launch them into heaven. He ushers the women and children to safely with the following words: