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By DWIGHT GARNER

Illustration by
Zach Trenholm

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For a man who dislikes interviews -- he has called them "a form to be loathed; a half-form like maggots" -- John Updike is an agile and adept interview subject. In conversation he seems to shed, as the critic James Wolcott has put it, "bright amounts of angel fluff" about almost any topic at hand. At age 64, there is indeed something snow-capped and oddly angelic about Updike; he seems to hover over the contemporary literary scene like an apparition from another era, the last great American man of letters.

On a recent Friday in New York, a snowy and harried day that would find him shuffling from "Good Morning America" to "Charlie Rose" to a marathon telephone conference with 20 journalists, Updike took an hour to talk to SALON about his new novel "In the Beauty of the Lilies" -- a vigorous and expansive book that tracks four generations in a single American family -- as well as a career that has spanned some 40 books, including 17 novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. He also spoke on a variety of other topics, including the American cinema and its discontents (Quentin Tarantino, "Leaving Las Vegas"), the current state of The New Yorker as witnessed in its fiction ("They kind of go for more pow, more zap"), Bill Clinton's sexual and political conundrums, and his rather autumnal feelings about the decline and fall of the American reader.

In your new novel, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," both religion and the movies figure very prominently in the lives of many of the characters, and there's a sense that film has somehow replaced religion as the place people look to for clues about how to live. How true is this?

It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived -- especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars -- not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul.

I don't know if that's true now. I think the movies have come to mean something else. There was much that was crass and harsh about the studio world; it was another kind of sweatshop, after all. And yet they kind of knew what they were doing, they kind of knew their audience. Once television began to steal away that middle-class audience, the movies seemed to get frantic: "What can we do that the TV can't?" And so you've got spectacle on the one hand, and a constant pushing of the sexual envelope on the other. And a feeling of trying too hard entered into the movies, for me, somewhere around 1957 or so. I go to movies still. My wife, as it happens, is even more of a movie addict than I. But you don't see many that give you the sense of a really coherent moral world. The old films sort of hung together as sermons (laughs).

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