Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Updike, John (Vol. 139) - Julian Barnes (review date 28 January 1996)

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Julian Barnes (review date 28 January 1996)

SOURCE: “Grand Illusion,” in New York Times Book Review, January 28, 1996, p. 9.

[In the following review, Barnes offers a positive assessment of In the Beauty of the Lilies.]

Domestic and epic, intimiste and magisterial, In the Beauty of the Lilies begins with a sly misdirection. D. W. Griffith is filming “The Call to Arms” on the grounds of a mock-medieval castle in Paterson, N.J., in the spring of 1910. Mary Pickford, short of sleep and over-costumed for a hot day, faints. This scene takes two pages. But Griffith, Pickford and the Biograph Company never reappear in the novel, they are images raised to be wiped. Instead, cut to:

“At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Joseph Epstein (essay date January 1983)
   2. Gail Godwin (review date 4 June 1984)
   3. Katha Pollitt (review date 23 June 1984)
   4. D. J. Enright (review date 2 February 1987)
   5. Edward Abbey (review date 28 March 1987)
   6. Richard Gilman (review date 20 June 1988)
   7. Denis Donoghue (review date 5 March 1989)
   8. Elizabeth Hardwick (review date 18 May 1989)
   9. John F. Fleischauer (essay date Summer 1989)
   10. Victor K. Lasseter (essay date October 1989)
   11. George J. Searles (review date 1–15 October 1990)
   12. Anthony Quinn (review date 26 October 1990)
   13. Barbara Leckie (essay date Spring 1991)
   14. Matthew Wilson (essay date Spring 1991)
   15. Martin Amis (review date 10 November 1991)
   16. Barbara Kingsolver (review date 6 February 1994)
   17. John Bayley (review date 12 May 1994)
   18. Jay Parini (review date 6 November 1994)
   19. Julian Barnes (review date 28 January 1996)
   20. A. O. Scott (review date 12 February 1996)
   21. Margaret Atwood (review date 12 October 1997)
   22. Tom LeClair (review date 3 November 1997)
   23. Robert Boyers (review date 17 November 1997)
   24. James Shapiro (review date 25 October 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Updike