In the Beauty of the Lilies
In Paterson, New Jersey in 1910 a Presbyterian minister loses his belief in God at the hour Mary Pickford faints on a location shoot a few streets away, and the loss travels down four generations — a mailman, an actress the country knows by her face, a boy who ends up armed inside a Colorado compound. Faith drains out of the century and the cinema fills the space it leaves. Updike took his title from the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
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