In a previous post I praised John Updike’s writing and the story he told in his 2006 novel Terrorist. I still hold that all I said then is true. Yet now I’ve just finished his 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, and I have mixed feelings.
With a career that started in the mid-1950s, this novel was written well into the period of Updike’s mainstream popularity and critical acclaim. The story follows a family over four generations starting before WWI and ending with the early 1990s destruction of a Texas cult, very loosely fashioned after the Branch Davidian disaster of that same time in Waco. We follow a number of family members through their risings and fallings with interest. Yet, I’ll leave the plot alone to talk about something I feel is more important, at least from a craft point of view. And that is adjectives. Writing instructors often tell writers to eschew them in favor of verbs which can turn static descriptions into active scenes. Good advice overall, but as a literary novelist, I use them, but with design in mind and having a clear and natural purpose, and not just as a lazy short cut (at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) But in much (not all) of Lillies, they tend to disappoint.
Adjectives are littered throughout the book contributing to his signature long sentences. But some of them leave a scent of “see what I can do” bravado and provide less value to the tale. Somehow, in Terrorist, they are more smartly woven (maybe because it was written a decade after Lilies,) and feel intricately organic to the long sentences I found so intriguing. No matter. Suffice it to say that there are whole sections of Lilies where adjectives feel pasted-in somewhat like a mother’s refrigerator door plastered with children’s drawings. “Isn’t that special, what little Johnny did.”
I’m certainly not going to denigrate one of my favorite authors of the 20th century. But I’m going to provide a couple examples where adjectives feel over-used and get in the way of the story.
“…the close-set deep-porched homes of the not uncomfortable, and the surprisingly stark rowhouses, with piebald asphalt shingles and sagging porches one step up from the pavement, tucked between the empty, hollow-eyed, rose-colored tannery and the busy bottle-cap factory…” P 155 of the 2013 Random House Trade Paperback Edition.
“Her silhouette had a perverse elegance, slouched into her protruding abdomen, which hoisted the front edge of her skirt an inch or two higher, up to her knees, and provided a little ledge where she sometimes unconsciously rested her cocked wrist as she held a smoking cigarette. She was all out-thrust angles, in her tight-fitting black helmet of hair.” P 219.
And another random sentence from p 156: “…but for slots between the buildings through which the shuffling glint of sunlight on water-dimples flashed through his eye…”
From p 157 “as if there were something deeply shameful in the vegetable itself, with its close, sour, secret fragrance and purplish head…”
So you may disagree, and feel free to have at it; and just reading them alone might not be as interruptive as they feel when in the flow of the novel itself. But to me, these are all examples of taking it too far in an effort to create something unique. Sure, there are verbs in the mix. Sure, we learn a lot in a single sentence. But I found myself paying more attention to the words than what they meant or did for me as a reader.
This all said, the last 50 pages of the novel tie some things together and I couldn’t stop until I reached the end. Enough said.
Write&Read 
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