Terrorist: A Novel

By John Updike

2007

320 pages / 10 hours and 46 minutes

Fiction

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This is a tough one. He might be the greatest American man of letters of the late 20th century. He was not only a brilliant fiction writer but also a respected literature and art critic. His novels won everything: the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle award, and he is one of only three people to win a Pulitzer for two different novels. So how do I admit that I am no great fan of John Updike? How can I claim to love good fiction and not embrace one of the most acclaimed novelists of our time? Now admittedly, almost everyone would agree that he did his best writing before 2000. The Rabbit novels are his legacy. Then he went through that period where he seemed to be writing mostly about sex and adultery. For the record, I think he was against it. If Walker Percy represents a Catholic sensibility in his fiction, Updike would be his Protestant counterpart. His religious concerns are always lurking.

Updike’s final novel (he died in 2009) is Terrorist, published in 2007. It drew a great deal of attention, including a front page review on the New York Times Book Review, yet very little critical acclaim. When you see lists of Updike’s great novels, this one is almost never on there. The book is about, well, a terrorist. I have to admit I rather like this novel more than a great many others of Updike’s. Although there is a fable-like quality to the story, I found the characters to be more or less believable and the plot to be quite suspenseful. A great deal of the story has to do with how an American youth becomes a terrorist. No one in the book is crazy. Their motivations seem real, which makes the book all the more disquieting. So we see Updike wrestling with a post-9/11 America and world. Here we are 14 years later, and the book is sadly more relevant than it was when it first came out.

There has never really been a question about Updike’s ability to write a sentence and a paragraph. His craftsmanship was always amazing. Nor can there be any question about what an astute observer of American life he was. He gazed long, thought carefully, and wrote insightfully for decades.

I have always been somewhat amused by the rivalry between him and Tom Wolfe, who would fancy himself as the great chronicler of American angst and greatness (The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, etc.). About one of Wolfe’s later novels, Updike was reported to have said, “Well, of course, it isn’t literature.”

So this review of Terrorist, a perfectly good novel, is actually an excuse to reflect on the larger career of John Updike and my lukewarmness to his work. Just because an author’s body of work is great (I mean truly great!) doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to like it a lot. So I hereby give you permission to pick the authors you like. However, like foods you have never tasted, you ought to give it a good try before you make up your mind. Who knows? Try it. You might like it. Or not.