Terrorist by john updike

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

This was the first Updike book I read.

Undoubtedly, it is evident that he is a highly skilled writer. However, when considering the book as a whole, I was left rather unimpressed.

The dialogue within the story struck me as being excessively lengthy and overly didactic. It seemed to drone on at times, lacking the natural flow and spontaneity that one would expect in a good narrative.

Moreover, the pacing of the book was quite slow. The story seemed to plod along, lacking the necessary momentum to keep me fully engaged.

I also had issues with the characterization. It was inconsistent and rather odd. For instance, the main character, who was American-born and educated, typically spoke in an extremely formal manner, almost like an ESL student. This was perplexing as it did not seem to align with his background.

Adding to the confusion, there were occasions when he would suddenly use more casual slang for no apparent reason.

Another aspect that I found hard to understand was the main character's attitude towards his peers' overt sexuality. He was apparently intolerant of it. However, he was completely fine with crude locker-room talk from a Moslem fundamentalist work buddy.

This seemed rather contradictory. Why wouldn't he be disgusted and disillusioned, especially if he regarded this person as a religious compatriot?

Although the plot twist at the end was very interesting, it was not enough to make up for the arduous trudge through the rest of the book.

Overall, while Updike's writing skills are undeniable, this particular book failed to live up to my expectations.

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belc_76

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

Updike's ability to vividly convey the reasons why someone might religiously hate America is truly intense.

He delves deep into the psyche of those with such views, presenting a complex and thought-provoking exploration.

However, it is rather unfortunate that he barely seems to remember what there is to love about this great nation.

The book does have its redeeming qualities, with parts of it, especially the ending, really working well.

It manages to bring a sense of closure and perhaps even a glimmer of hope.

Nevertheless, the rest of the work can be seen as self-indulgent, cynical, and caricatured.

Updike seems to get lost in his own musings and fails to present a more balanced and comprehensive view.

Overall, while the book has its moments, it ultimately falls short in fully capturing the essence and beauty of America.

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targetoverload

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

This was truly very disappointing.

From the very beginning, I could sense that Ahmad, if not the 'Terrorist' himself, was likely to be embroiled in some form of terrorism. However, it was quite astonishing that it took a whopping 310 pages to reach that point.

Moreover, if it had to be so, the narrative should have delved more deeply into Ahmad's 'transition' from an ordinary guy to a terrorist.

I simply wasn't convinced that he truly wanted to become a terrorist.

I saw Ahmad as a young man who had endured a great deal of bad luck. His father was absent, his mother was absent-minded, and he was bullied at school. In search of comfort, he turned to religion.

His teachings from the Shaikh never seemed overly intense or radical.

Charlie was the first figure who I thought might have actually influenced Ahmad's mindset, but it all seemed far too simplistic.

One day, Charlie asks him if he would die for G-d, and Ahmad simply says yes. The very next day, he is suddenly part of a terrorist plot.

Maybe that's how it really happens in the real world, or maybe it isn't. But as a reader, I remained unconvinced.

I also felt that there was a great deal of empty plot.

The affair between Ahmad's counsellor, Jack Levy (who is Jewish by birth but doesn't practice, which unfortunately allows for a lot of offhand, vaguely antisemitic remarks from other characters), and his mother was completely unnecessary.

It only seemed to make a modicum of sense when Jack was able to prevent Ahmad from going through with the plot, which, incidentally, also seemed incredibly unrealistic.

Jack's sister-in-law works for Homeland Security! If he has told her that he is suspicious of his own student, where on earth are the police? It's seriously strange.

And yet another unnecessary aspect was the excessive amount of writing about fat women and women's weight. It added absolutely nothing to the story and simply came across as fatphobic.

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LeanaPhantomhive

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

This was likely not the ideal place to begin with Updike. However, I discovered the stereotyping of non-whites in this book to be rather insulting.

Look, having a mild dissatisfaction with the surrounding world and being a lonely Muslim teenager does not inevitably lead to a desire to bomb people. If we change the main character's religion from Islam to Christianity, the author's handling of his main character's motivation is revealed to be at least completely absurd and, at worst, quite offensive. Ahmad allegedly becomes a terrorist because he lacks a father, attends Qur'an lessons once a week, and his Imam secures him a job driving a furniture van with a terrorist.

Oh, and of course, because he is a Muslim. The fact that he doesn't particularly trust or like the Imam seems to be immaterial - they are both Muslims, you see, so it must be "One For All, All For One and DEATH TO THE INFIDELS". Fortunately, the evil terrorist plot is thwarted when the educated, reasonable, religiously apathetic Jewish white liberal intervenes to Save The Day by talking down the fanatical fundamentalist. Honestly, I am not making this up.

Incidentally, it is not just Muslims who are offensively caricatured. A black girl at school whom Ahmad likes initially sings in the church choir until they leave school, when she immediately becomes a prostitute being pimped out by her boyfriend - who is named Tylenol because of an advert his mother saw. Again, I am not making this up.

And don't even get me started on the speech of the non-white characters. The black kids speak like old white men assume black kids speak, and Ahmad, although American-born and raised single-handedly by his white Irish mother in New Jersey, talks as if English is his third language and he has just disembarked from a plane from the Middle East.

It is very evident that Mr Updike can write prose, but it is also clear that he dedicated far more time and attention to that prose than to the research, plot, and characterization of this novel. There is a great novel to be written about how a disaffected young man could have his sense of loneliness and isolation distorted and manipulated into an involvement with extremism and terrorism, but this is nowhere near that. Oh dear.

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spookybee

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

I have arrived at Updike rather belatedly in my reading journey; Terrorist is an odd starting point for me. It reads smoothly, as if an essayist were expanding a short story into a novel. However, it also feels overly concise, lacking the literary refinement or intensity that I had anticipated.

As a teacher, I was struck by the lack of firm belief among the adults in Updike's America. From the named guidance counselor's marital turmoil to the indistinct distance of teachers as a community of practice, this is a world of lazy subsistence. A few characters - Ahmad, Jack, Terry - are drawn with sensitivity: the detailing of their interactions is well-timed, and in their dynamics, Updike poses interesting questions about some of the fractures in American society.

In contrast to this brokenness, the earnestness of youth is a disconcerting theme in this story. In a world that kindles desire - both fleeting and purchasable - Ahmad is presented as largely sympathetic. Nevertheless, his interaction with the black community in the form of a gospel church and an attractive classmate appears to have divided readers. Still, the relationship of his passing love is carefully managed, as disturbing as her powerless acceptance of her pimp relationship with a violent bully.

Another character well-handled within the context of the text is the mother figure, an artist who is aware of her son's struggles from a distance. In her, we sense the tensions between individual freedoms and the agenda for social justice in the American psyche: she leans almost entirely towards the (artistic) freedom camp, although clearly not without difficulty. Her rejected preciousness belies the belligerence of her survival as a single mother in New York, again from a distance.

And it is this distance that seems to me to be the defining characteristic of this work. Consumerism is addressed, but indirectly, focused through the weary eyes of Ahmad and Jack. This is not a world of rationality but rather a world of feeling and the meaning of lives in a realm of survival. As such, almost all perspectives seem exhausted. Yet despite this weariness, the characters desire more than their lot. Despite the somewhat artificial ending, these ambitions scrape away the stodgy ashes of determinism from the novel and make it a human read.

Worth reading, but I imagine it would be best to start with the other stories that made his reputation.

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Jackobill20000

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

Ahmad is a character in a book who lacks depth in some ways. However, the overall story has rich characters. Updike might have left Ahmad without much depth on purpose, perhaps thinking that all absolutists are not complex. The book seems to be about finding meaning in our daily lives, which are filled with consumeristic impulses. Ahmad wants to do something greater than himself, like a self-sacrifice, instead of succumbing to the drudgery of middle-class life. His antidote to a boring life is to do something for God. But this takes him down a dangerous path.

Ahmad, a fundamentalist Muslim, is looking for a way out of the lower middle-class grind. For him, meaning comes in the form of the absolutist faith of fundamental Islam. He feels certain when he practices it, seeing the world as clear cut good or evil. But this can be bad, as seen when he misinterprets the friendliness of a girl. Fundamentalists can also be easily manipulated by their preachers.

What's troubling about Ahmad is that he's one-dimensional. Growing up in America, you'd think he'd have an internal conflict between his faith and American society, but up to chapter 2, he's a fundamentalist through and through. The book also seems formulaic, with Ahmad coming from a violent working-class neighborhood. Despite his boring faith, I like how the book ended with his faith intact but his understanding changed.

Updike juxtaposes Ahmad with Levy, a guidance counselor who is unfulfilled in his secular life. Jack and Beth Levy have achieved middle-class success externally but are bored and unfulfilled internally. The story also shows the travesty of one-parent households and how Ahmad looks for a father figure in Islam. The immigrant Chehab defends American freedoms, but his motivation for the destruction of America seems more political than religious. In the end, Updike seems to favor the secular logical man over a person of faith. The book comments on the danger of absolutist faith and the meaninglessness of a consumeristic life, and still shows the influence of the counter-cultural sixties.

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chillassfoo

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

Not long ago, I came across an introduction to a large collection of Updike's short stories, which was penned by Updike himself. If my memory serves me right, it concludes with him characterizing his task as "giv[ing] the mundane its beautiful due."

In "Terrorist," Updike is still grappling with the mundane, but this story lacks almost anything beautiful or dutiful. Instead, it consists of mediocre individuals attempting to be larger than life - or at least halfheartedly resisting Updike's efforts to make them so - and failing throughout.

This novel was written by an artist who has passed his prime, striving to make a relevant statement about the world as he perceives it in his eighth decade. For some reason, Updike, usually the most meticulous of wordsmiths, becomes fixated on a pair of words throughout: "stovepipe" and "knot." Neither of them makes sense, in or out of context, yet he employs them repeatedly.

The New Republic's remarkable literary critic, James Wood (who has recently joined The New Yorker), was rather savage in his review of this novel, mainly attacking Updike's strange and unwavering obsession with the shapes and smells of sexual intercourse. He could have just as easily taken a different approach and criticized Updike for making Nelson Angstrom, the guidance-counselor hero of a novel ostensibly about terrorism.

Although Updike didn't name the alcoholic, depressive, married-to-an-obese-woman high school guy "Nelson Angstrom" in "Terrorist," he made the character every bit like the Nelson we encountered in "Licks of Love," albeit conveniently Jewish - to make the young, devout Muslim, mixed-parents Arab protagonist despise him for being an infidel.

As great as Updike was in "Rabbit is Rich," his crash course in Islam and nonsensical passages from the Koran (admittedly, it's difficult to find two connected thoughts in the entire volume) do not serve his literary style well.

All of this might have been salvaged - though probably not - had Updike done something other than give up on the ending. But he was unable to take the decisive step, just like his protagonist.

I generally peruse the "U" section in the public library whenever I'm there - as Updike remains one of the top 5 greatest living American literary figures - and when I discovered "Terrorist," even after Wood's review, I thought: Mediocre Updike is still better than what most other contemporary American novelists can offer at their best.

I was mistaken.

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Waspscreama

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

Although it had been decades since I read anything by Updike, I still have vivid memories of his remarkable works. His short stories about the Maples, the engaging Rabbit series, and the profound The Centaur all left a lasting impression. Like many others, I was once guilty of pigeonholing him, believing he was solely preoccupied with conventional middle-class people and their domestic issues such as divorce. However, I soon realized that this was an unfair assessment.

In terms of his writing craft, Updike's use of literary devices is truly masterful. It is so seamless that one can easily read past his clever nuances without even noticing. Only upon reflection the next day does one have an "a-ha" moment. This has been my experience on more than one occasion. His prose can sometimes border on poetry, yet it never draws attention to itself.

Regarding the subject matter, an unconventional outside world often infiltrates the lives he portrays. This is especially evident in Terrorist. The story follows Ahmad, an alienated high school graduate in a seedy working-class town in New Jersey. He has no memory of his father, an Egyptian immigrant who abandoned his mother after impregnating her. His mother, a rebel against authority, has led a bohemian lifestyle and provided little guidance. Repelled by the chaos of American society and nurturing idealized dreams of his father, Ahmad began seeking other influences as an adolescent.
The other main character is a guidance counselor from Ahmad's school, an elderly secular Jew with his own set of problems. He doesn't encounter Ahmad until just before graduation but immediately recognizes his unusual potential. This realization snaps him out of his despondency as he senses that Ahmad's potential is not being channeled constructively. Sadly, Ahmad shows no interest in what the counselor has to say.
Terrorist is truly a great story, told with great beauty and filled with deep insights into two completely incompatible world views and characters who come alive on the page.

It makes the reader think about the complex issues of identity, religion, and the search for meaning in a modern world.

Updike's ability to create such rich and nuanced characters and storylines is a testament to his literary genius.

Even after all these years, his work continues to resonate and inspire.

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Terrorist

john updike

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