Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

BookBrowse Reviews Terrorist by John Updike

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

Terrorist by John Updike

Terrorist

by John Updike
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (8):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Jun 6, 2006, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • May 2007, 320 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Reviews

BookBrowse:


A recipe for terrorism - Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame, and half-baked plots,
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

From the book jacket:  The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New Jersey. Neither the world-weary, depressed guidance counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad’s mischievously seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.  But to quote the Qur’an: Of those who plot, God is the best.

Comment: John Updike’s controversial twenty-second novel has garnered reviews both positive and negative.  All the prepublication reviews were generally positive, with starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist ("deserves the label of masterpiece").  Those that come down against the book generally don't do so because of the subject matter but because they feel that the voice of Ahmad lacks credibility.  As the Boston Herald puts it: "Updike’s jerry-built, between-two-worlds son of an absent Egyptian father and artsy Irish-American mother, exposes himself as a wooden prop in a scarcely thrilling moral drama. He’s a ticking bomber-in-waiting from the get-go, though not a very believable one: If there are high schoolers today who walk around musing, as Ahmad does, about 'maieutic irony*,' I haven’t met them - and I don’t believe Updike has either." 

Ahmad and his teacher compare New York to the wealthy and prideful people of Ad, who were struck down in their prime (see sidebar); and Updike does not pull any punches as he views complacent, overindulgent, morally befuddled urban America through their eyes.

In addition to Ahmad's viewpoint, we also see through the eyes of an elderly Lebanese immigrant; that immigrant's American-born son; and a Yemeni imam, who all, in turn, interpret what they consider America to be based on their own experience - an experience set against the backdrop of the decaying remnants of industrial New Jersey, once a prospering area energized by immigrants.  

*According to the OED, maieutic = pertaining to (intellectual) midwifery; i.e. to the Socratic process of helping a person to bring into full consciousness conceptions previously latent in his mind (from the Greek maieuesthai, to act as midwife).

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in July 2006, and has been updated for the June 2007 edition. Click here to go to this issue.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book:
  The Ad

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Terrorist, try these:

  • I Am Pilgrim jacket

    I Am Pilgrim

    by Terry Hayes

    Published 2014

    About This book

    This astonishing debut espionage thriller depicts the collision course between two geniuses, one a tortured hero and one a determined terrorist, in a breakneck story reminiscent of John le Carré and Robert Ludlum at their finest.

  • The Walking Dead jacket

    The Walking Dead

    by Gerald Seymour

    Published 2008

    About This book

    More by this author

    A young man starts a journey from a dusty village in Saudi Arabia. An armed protection officer is charged with neutralizing the growing menace to London's safety. With intelligence and deep understanding, Seymour shows us the world in which we live, with all its dangers and complexities, and the choices we are forced to make.

We have 9 read-alikes for Terrorist, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by John Updike
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

At times, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by a spark from another person.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.