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Okay, I didn’t exactly finish this one, but I’m finished with it. I gave it 105 pages. Do you want to know what happened in 105 pages? Ahmad met with his guidance counselor, went to church, and went to a lesson with his Qur’an teacher. That’s it. I was so bored with this that I couldn’t even bring myself to care about the blatant anti-Americanism and misogynism. The red light started flashing when I hit the 18 page description of a church mass (or whatever it’s called when it’s not a Catholic ch...
Tomorrow is the ninth anniversary of September 11th, and if you really want to scare the daylights out of yourself in memoriam, then John Updike’s Terrorist can help you out with that. It is a creepy, timely, get-under-your-skin-and-make-you-itch kind of novel. But before I get to all that, I must digress a little.John Updike is also the author of one of my favorite short stories to teach to high school students, titled “A&P.” Notice how I said it’s one of my favorites, not theirs. First of all,...
John Updike has earned a mantel full of awards, including a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. He knows people and he knows how tough even the most mundane lives can be. And Updike knows how to write. At his best when writing of “normal” people living flawed, empathetic lives, Updike stretches himself in his latest novel, “Terrorist.” He writes the story of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Mulloy, the American son of an Egyptian exchange student father who ran off when Ahmad was three without so much as...
The main trouble with Terrorist is in the voicing of the characters. The anti-hero, Ahmad, is a half-Arab American teenager who is groomed to become a terrorist by the imam at a local mosque. In many ways, besides his faith, he is a typical teen, self-concerned, withdrawn, and amazed at the hypocricy of adults. Yet Updike, for whatever reason, inserts his stodgy authorial voice into Ahmad's body, making him sound like a geriatric middle-eastern diplomat. Despite having grown up in America, Ahmad...
Terrorism is on everyone’s mind these days and so I wondered how Updike would treat the subject in this book written post 9/11 but before the more recent spate of terrorist attacks that have extended to countries outside the United States.Ahmad is a US citizen, born in that country of an Irish-American mother and an absentee Egyptian father. Despite being raised by his mother, he is drawn to his father’s faith and is schooled by the shadowy imam Sheikh Rashid to follow the Straight Path of restr...
Oh John, oh John. You ignored the idea of "write what you know." What you know well, and write beautifully about, are WASP middle-aged men of a certain socio-economic group. What you don't know is African-Americans and Muslims. You never shoulda wandered from your own back yard.This book is so full of breath-taking stereotypes that I cringed. Gack.
Although it had been decades since I read anything by Updike, I still have clear memories of his short stories about the Maples, his Rabbit series, and The Centaur. Like others, I’ve been guilty of pigeonholing him as being preoccupied with conventional middle-class people and their domestic issues (divorce, etc.). I also sensed that it wasn’t fair to do that. In terms of craft, his use of literary devices is so smooth that one can read right past something that’s exceedingly clever without even...
This book doesn't work very well if you were hoping for an explanation of what turns some young American Muslims into terrorists. It works even less well as a thriller. But read it as a long personal letter from seventy-something John Updike and it's pretty good. He no longer understands the teens he sees in the street; he tries to imagine how they think, how they talk and act when they're with each other, and he can't do it. It's as though there's a force field around them that repels his inqui...
I just can't do it. I tried, honestly. I got to page ten. I'm moving on.Updated to shelve in various suitable places I did not have available in 2010.
It was hard for me to finish this novel and this was due to the fact that Updike really didn't know what he was talking about through out his Novel .his interpretation of Islam was based on "the steriotype ' kind of Muslim he miss used and miss interpreted a religion of billions of people .I just want to to talk about his use of El hotama which is in the Muslims Holly book "El qoran" and other words from the qoran I noticed how he didn't translate it's words correctly and also how he omitted the...
How is this guy so successful? This book is crap. Young utterly stereotypical Muslim kid who has an Irish mother (so that updike could describe her hair and temper every 3 pages) is seduced into a terrorist cell. Also included are stereotypical, completely unbelievable Black high-school aged reluctant prostitutes and stereotypical, completely unbelievable sympathetic and apparently telepathic English teachers.
This was probably not the place to start with Updike but I found the stereotyping of non-whites in this book pretty insulting. Look, mild disaffection with the world around and being a lonely muslim teenager you does not automatically lead to you wanting to bomb people. Change the main character's religion from Islam to Christianity and the author's treatment of his main character's motivation is shown to be at least utterly ridiculous and at worst, pretty offensive. Ahmad apparently becomes a t...
i’ve been an atheist as long as i can remember and my life, in part, has been a feigned attempt toward belief. i will never believe and know this, so i scramble toward god as a tightrope walker over a net of godlessness. the point, i guess, is to get as close as possible to something i know i’ll never reach; a more sophisticated (or not) form of a kid throwing a fit after having learned that santa claus is just some miserable minimum wage worker with a fake white beard and boozy breath. radical
I walked into this expecting not to like it. Updike is an author I feel pretty comfortable referring to pejoratively as an “old white guy,” which comes packed with a matrix of assumptions about his ability to write non-male, non-white, non-old characters with due sensitivity and intelligence and authority. Now, Updike is definitely an old white guy, but this book, it turns out, is really good, in part because my expectations weren’t met. Terrorist is about Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy, a half-Irish, hal...
Terrorist is John Updike's last novel. The novel opens and closes with Ahmad Allowy's inner thought, "These Devils seek to take away my God," and, at the end, "These Devils have taken away my God." Ahmad is a devout Muslim youth living in New Prospect, NJ, about to graduate from high school. He's living with his white mother, an artist, whose life is not quite as structured as Ahmad's. Ahmad is an outsider at school - his religious devotion is at odds with the loose, irreverent culture he sees
A teenage punk with an aimless need to fit in nearly drifts into the life of a domestic terrorist. But the kid's kindly high school guidance counselor snaps him out of it by gently breaking the news (at the very last minute) that the kid's mother is a big fat hoe. Huh?John Updike fails to create a single believable hero, or even a memorable villain. He patronizes everyone in the story, all women, all ethnic groups, all non-whites, while acting as if he's a great guy for clapping on the mask of p...
Our book group read this last month, and I think I'm the only one who really liked it. Updike's writing is, as always, wonderful--great descriptions of his main characters, a 17-yr-old h.s. senior who is half-Irish and half-middle Eastern and who becomes a devout Muslim, his mother, a would-be artist, and his h.s. guidance counselor, 60+ and Jewish. The kid, of course, gets pulled into a terrorist cell, and . . . It occurred to me later that the title may be ironic--Karma, read it just for the w...
The term "radicalization" gets used a lot in the media; John Updike takes us behind the term and shows us the process. 18 year old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy becomes an example of both the process and the steps that bring someone to the 'gate' of The Straight Path...a path that will lead to uncharted territory.
In 2006, the Don of American Literature was finally ready to address the events of 9/11. I recall that this was a time, for American artists, of numbness, of complete loss of hope and faith in the humanity we as artists struggle so tirelessly to portray, to express, to challenge, and to understand. As tons of debris were being hauled from World Trade Center Plaza, and the place was being dusted off and readied for a new era, so were America’s artists hauling out their own psychic detritus, in so...
Forget Stephen King. This is hands-down one of the most frightening books I've ever read. In no uncertain terms, Updike shows us how the quest for God can be perverted into a desire to suppress, diminish, and eventually destroy those with different beliefs. He burrows so deeply into the mind of the believer that he seduces you into following their logic, and frightens you with how quickly you discard even the most basic respect for life outside that framework.