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In the Beauty of the Lilies (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

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The American writer Henry David Thoreau once observed that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. In many ways, the heroes and heroines of John Updike’s novels are dramatizations of that maxim. Although there are exceptions—the ruler of the African country who emerges as the hero in The Coup comes immediately to mind—the majority of the figures who have populated his fiction are ordinary folk. On occasion, some have extraordinary sensibility, but almost without variation they are much like one’s next-door neighbors. Their range of occupations has been wide; his most...

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