SOURCE: “God Goes to the Movies,” in Nation, February 12, 1996, pp. 25–8.

In the following review, Scott offers a positive evaluation of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The title of John Updike's seventeenth novel is foreshadowed in Self-Consciousness, the memoir he published a few years ago:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea—this odd and uplifting line from among the many odd lines of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” seemed to me, as I set out, to summarize what I had to say about America, to offer itself as the title of a continental magnum opus of which all my books, no matter how many, would be mere installments, mere starts at the hymning of this great roughly rectangular country severed from Christ by the breadth of the sea.

Whatever this means, it gives a sense of the intended scope of the...