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June 04, 2006
Updike's Terrorist
John Updike's novel Terrorist (Knopf 2006) explores how an eighteen year old New Jerseyian comes to believe in terrorism- his parents allowed him to study what he wanted very much like the real life American Taliban John Walker Lindh, a 16 year old Californian.
Excerpt from Terrorist
Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God. All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see? Boys strut and saunter along and look dead-eyed, indicating with their edgy killer gestures and careless scornful laughs that this world is all there is — a noisy varnished hall lined with metal lockers and having at its end a blank wall desecrated by graffiti and roller-painted over so often it feels to be coming closer by millimeters.read the rest here
A Thumbs DOWN Review from the Baltimore Sun:
Give John Updike points for courage. Writing a novel about an Islamist terrorist has many hazards, not the least of which is the possibility that your novel may be eclipsed by real-world events before it's even published.read the rest here
The political climate adds another risk: When word got out that Updike's new novel would feature a sympathetic terrorist and harsh criticism of American culture, conservative bloggers were swift to denounce it in advance. Other pitfalls include the danger that the book will veer into the kind of sensationalism and melodrama that one doesn't expect of a writer with a serious literary reputation like Updike's. Add to this the fact that Updike, a 74-year-old Christian, has made his novel's central character an 18-year-old Muslim, and the word that comes to mind is chutzpah.
With all the odds against it, it would be nice to report that Updike has avoided the land mines. But he hasn't.
A Thumbs UP Review from the Seattle Times:
A way opens before him. Updike carries us along as Ahmad takes one step and then another and another, as the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable but desirable. For Ahmad, the real terror is the life toward which his blighted world seems to be pushing him. Blinded by his own ideals, Ahmad sees not human beings, but "doomed animals gathered in the odor of mating and mischief." What, after all, are such lives worth except as sacrifices to signify his unwavering faith in his God? Yet there is a surprising power in his aging guidance counselor to show the value of these people who to Ahmad seem utterly soulless.read the rest here
Posted by Soniah Kamal at June 4, 2006 08:25 PM
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Posted by: Anonymous at June 4, 2006 08:25 PM
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