In the Beauty of the Lilies Book

This is the first Updike novel I read, and upon reading, it was apparent to me what incredible mastery of the English language Updike has. I was totally impressed by his use of words to describe scenery, thoughts, feelings, people, everything. Beautiful, clean sentences. Compact thoughts that linger over the paragraph. A story of four generations in an east-coast American family, the reader rides the waves of nostalgia gliding along impressively guided by the pull of Updikes wordsmithing. The first 20 pages are the toughest to get through, as (and this is so neat) Updike seems to shape the text according to the character, and since the first character presented is an old-fashioned minister of the Victorian era wrestling with his own spiritual/philosophical demons, the prose is wordy, flowery and kind of cumbersome. Then as the story moves on to his son, a child of the 30s, things loosen, and then on to that son's daughter, a child of the 50s, and the language is smooth and simplified. The book covers so much in the history of 20th-century American life, it's near impossible not to recognize places, items, phrases, people, films. Things get a unsettling toward the end with a Waco-like standoff at a religious compound in the Colorado mountains, and it left me feeling kind of sour. But overall, it's a sweet book, a story you can sink your teeth into and easily relate to while following these characters through their lives from adolesence through adulthood.