WE LOST IT AT THE MOVIES

By Paul Gray

ALL JOHN UPDIKE'S 16 previous novels have employed artful compressions, alluding to past events, when necessary, through a vivid present. Sometimes their titles make this focus clear: A Month of Sundays, Memories of the Ford Administration (which lasted, for those who missed or have forgotten it, about 30 months). Even the tetralogy of books that portray Rabbit Angstrom concentrates on spasms of activity set at 10-year intervals of his life. It is therefore surprising to learn that In the Beauty of the Lilies (Knopf; 491 pages; $25.95) covers a whopping 80 years and four generations of a single American family. In his mid-60s, Updike has set off on what is, for his career, the equivalent of an experimental novel.

Long family chronicles were once, of course, staples of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, and the reason they have been far less commonplace since is their tendency, in inexpert hands, to be enslaved by chronology, to become little more than one damned thing after another. Updike aims to avoid this danger by using overarching themes to bind up the threads of his lengthy story: the decline of religious faith and the corresponding rise of the movies.

This pairing is signaled in the novel's opening pages. In the late spring of 1910, in Paterson, New Jersey, D.W. Griffith is directing a film titled The Call to Arms. Just at the moment the leading lady, Mary Pickford, faints from the unseasonable heat, a few blocks away Presbyterian minister Clarence Arthur Wilmot loses his belief in the Divinity: "the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there be."

Clarence's subsequent resignation from the ministry sends shock waves that will ripple down through the Wilmot family history. His youngest son Teddy, watching his father try to support the family by selling encyclopedias door to door and then slowly dying of tuberculosis, becomes cautious and fearful. He takes a job as a soda jerk and eventually marries one of his customers. She is religious, but Teddy tells her not to expect him to share her faith: "My poor dad wanted to believe and needed to believe and God just stayed silent."

Like his father, Teddy enjoys going to the movies. His daughter Essie not only carries on this family trait, she actually leaves home to become a 1950s Hollywood star under the name Alma DeMott. Bit parts--"as a gangster's black-haired nightclub date in Hayworth's soggy Affair in Trinidad, as one of the dance-hall 'hostesses' in From Here to Eternity"--lead to co-starring roles with the likes of Cooper, Gable and Crosby. Essie's grandmother, Clarence's widow, sees this triumph as her husband's vindication: "When Clarence--when he--fell, it was so sudden and uncalled-for, there had to be something to ... make it come right in the end."

But redemption of a more painful sort awaits Essie's son Clark, who is lured from booze and drugs into the bunkers of a Colorado religious cult. On first seeing this ramshackle structure, he thinks "this would go up like bales of hay if it ever started to burn." Sure enough, in a sequence closely modeled on the 1993 Branch Davidian standoff and tragedy in Waco, Texas, the torches arrive.

Unfortunately, the novel as a whole never consistently catches fire. It is fascinating to watch a writer of Updike's dexterity cram and mold all this diverse material into a single book. He renders, as tellingly as ever, the magic of individual moments. A movie begins in a small theater: "The heavy purple curtains drew back and the orange side lamps dimmed and in the air above their heads, with a racheted whir, a shuddering shaft of light surprised a few winged bugs, suddenly turned into darting, looping stars." But to fill up the long stretches between inspirations, Updike relies on recitations of headlines and on reams of relatively undigested research: how to grow and pick asparagus, how to operate a suppository-making machine, how to retool an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle into a fully automatic M-16.

The novel's central thesis--that movie theaters have become modern America's houses of worship--is never really demonstrated in action. Except for Essie's adventures in Hollywood, the lives and deaths of the various Wilmots transpire at a far remove from silver screens. And for all its author's labors toward unity, In the Beauty of the Lilies remains an assemblage of separate and unequally inspired fragments.