is starting to decline, Alma becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son she names Clark, in honor of Clark Gable who is recently deceased. She makes a successful comeback in a series of musicals, but her son grows up neglected. Part IV The final section focuses on Clark and jumps ahead to the late 1980s when he is an aimless young man halfheartedly working as a ski lift operator for his great uncle Jared in Colorado. The evening after an altercation with another employee, he meets a young woman called Hannah who invites him home with her. It turns out she lives in a religious commune, similar to that of the Branch Davidians. Clark agrees to stay on, partially out of aimlessness and attraction to Hannah, but also because the group's puritanical stance on modern American pop culture, particularly movies, appeals to him (reversing the stance of his great grandfather who abandoned religion and embraced the newly born film industry). The group consists of several young adults and their children, led by the charismatic but controlling Jesse. Turning more and more away from modern American life, the group grows increasingly paranoid and isolated, refusing to send its children to school and shooting at a school bus driver. This eventually leads to a siege similar to that at Waco. Jesse orders Clark and the other adult male followers to shoot all the women and children; Clark however rebels and shoots Jesse instead. This action ends up saving most of the women and children, although Clark is shot and killed himself soon afterward. A number of Clark's relatives, including Ted (now a widower in his nineties) view the siege on the television news. Despite their shock and grief they are proud that the young man most of them had dismissed years ago as a loser has saved so many lives. Reception Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called the novel “dazzling”. An attempt “to chart the fortunes of an American family through four generations and some 80 years, and in doing so, create a portrait of the country, from its nervous entry into the 20th century to its stumbling approach to the millennium,” writes Kakutani in her assessment. “‘In the Beauty of the Lilies’ is not only Mr. Updike's most ambitious novel to date, but arguably his finest: a big, generous book, narrated with Godlike omniscience and authority and