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Terrorist
by John Updike
A Muslim New Jersey teenager contemplates an attack against the United States in Updike's 22nd novel.
Knopf, 320 pages
06/06/2006
$24.95
ISBN: 0307264653
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Kirkus Reviews
However it's read, Updike, approaching his mid-70s, continues to entice, provoke and astonish. [1 Apr 2006, p.323]
Booklist Brad Hooper
This marvelous novel can be accurately labeled as a 9/11 novel, but it deserves also the label of masterpiece for its carefully nuanced building up of the psychology of those who traffic in terrorism. [15 Mar 2006, p.6]
Publishers Weekly
So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel.
The Independent Matt Thorne
It's a strange reflection of our age that the thriller now appears to be the most socially responsible genre while novels about sex-obsessed seniors seem horribly decadent, but Updike has adjusted brilliantly.
The Independent Justin Cartwright
As the well-signposted climax approaches, the tension increases and we find that, in addition to all his other gifts, Updike writes a gripping thriller.
The Guardian Jem Poster
Although the plot creaks a little, particularly in the novel's closing stages, this is a work of considerable distinction. Updike remains one of contemporary literature's most enviable stylists, the lucid economy of his prose often disguising, but never betraying, the remarkable complexity of his thought.
Houston Chronicle Terrence Doody
I like Terrorist with its ending precisely for its questions and the doubts it opens up.
Chicago Sun-Times John Barron
What's most welcome is the page-turning pace the book sets right from the start. We instantly sense that Ahmad is ripe and ready for action. With the right teacher and the right timing and the perfect seduction, we see how effortlessly he can be recruited for a terrorist assignment.
The New York Times Book Review Robert Stone
The last part of the novel is suspenseful. It brings together a serviceable plot, which leans a little heavily on coincidental connections, a questionable provocation and some broadly motivated acts of heroism.
Village Voice Benjamin Strong
Updike's ear for teen slang has dulled, and a number of his racial stereotypes are, let's just say, dated. Still, he hasn't lost sympathy for adolescent torment, and to the extent Terrorist succeeds it does so thanks to his skilled rendering of a sensitive, overly serious, angry young man.
New York Review Of Books Jonathan Raban
Because Updike shrinks from giving any real credence to the ideology that drives his plot (in both senses of that word), the book becomes a temporarily enthralling, but ultimately empty, shaggy dog story.
Library Journal Henry L. Carrigan
Updike's always beautiful prose and his ever-probing imagination trace what happens when worlds collide. [15 May 2006, p.94]
Bookslut Alexander C. Kafka
A searing hybrid of character study and thriller that's more successful as the former than as the latter.
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
An emotionally daring novel, gripping in its insight into the mind of a boy adrift in life who believes utterly in God, and thus by default in the manipulators who would perpetrate violence in the name of religion. It is also uneven: sometimes dull in its recitation of the author's research, with a couple of ludicrous plot developments that rob the novel of its ultimate punch.
The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray
Beneath Terrorist's flabby social commentary and ludicrous plot, there's a heartbreaking sketch of how religious faith either dies, or evolves into a perversion of whatever ideal it was supposed to espouse.
The Observer Tim Adams
Despite all the imperatives of his plotline Updike is incapable of clunkiness, but while he creates a character of genuine complex sympathy in Ahmad, the 'terrorist' never quite emerges as a credible mass murderer.
The Spectator Ian Sansom
Its great weakness; Updike, always keen to keep up to pace, towards the end of the book becomes exhausted by his own inventiveness and by the strains and pressures of the time.
Washington Post Amitav Ghosh
There is nothing plausible about the characters of this book: Only two of them are half-way believable, and they are Jack Levy and Ahmad's Irish-American mother. It is no accident, perhaps, that neither of them is brown.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Stephen Abell
An unnaturally reductive portrait.
Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Riemer
[Updike] also is capable of revealing a shallow streak, and this new novel on the most topical of contemporary issues is, sadly, an instance of that.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Updike makes some profound comments about capitalist bloat and the lure of extreme faith, but he has entrusted them to minimally developed characters delivering clumsy platform papers.
The New Republic James Wood
It is the otherness of Islamicism that is missing in this book. Despite all the Koranic homework, there is a sense that what is alien in Islam to a Westerner remains alien to John Updike. What he has discovered, yet again, is merely the generalized fluid of God-plus-sex that has run throughout all his novels. [3 July 2006, p.25]
San Francisco Chronicle Floyd Skloot
On the surface, it all sounds realistic, a plot ripped from today's headlines. On Updike's pages, however, the novel is almost wholly without credibility.
The Nation Jonathan Shainin
Terrorist, glutted with its fragments of Arabic, its consummately pretty descriptions of everything under the sun, filled with Ahmad's halfhearted parodies of speeches by Ayman al-Zawahiri, is all information, and it withholds from the reader the critical contribution fiction might make to our understanding: what it feels like to murder for God, to strike with righteous vengeance against the enemies of the umma.
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
But Updike reserves his real revulsion for the obese, especially women. Take Jack's wife, Beth, who is 100 pounds overweight. Her husband calls her "the whale" and obsesses about her "mountains of flesh" and body odor. Frankly, for the first half of the novel, Updike appears more concerned with the war on obesity than he does the war on terrorism.
New York Observer Adam Begley
What we don’t need is the mechanics of his terrorist mission and the shadowy conspiracy that supports it; or the fumbling counter-conspiracy aimed at thwarting it; or the unsteady ratcheting of suspense. Cloak-and-dagger is not Mr. Updike’s strength. It’s as if, after battering us with anti-American tirades, he suddenly thought he’d better whip up some thrills. They’re about as effective as the Department of Homeland Security raising the “terror-threat level” from yellow to orange. [5 June 2006, p.14]
Wall Street Journal Joseph Bottum
Terrorist is filled with attempts at daring moments, dangerous choices, surprising twists and dramatic events accelerating toward a big finish. But it all falls flat, the tropes of the stereotypical thriller squandered by the hopeless plot.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Unfortunately, the would-be terrorist in this novel turns out to be a completely unbelievable individual: more robot than human being and such a cliché that the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found the idea of such a person so incomprehensible that he at some point abandoned any earnest attempt to depict his inner life and settled instead for giving us a static, one-dimensional stereotype.
Atlantic Monthly Christopher Hitchens
Given some admittedly stiff competition, Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon.
 The average user rating for this book is 5.0 (out of 10) based on 10 User Votes
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