Synopses & Reviews
The ever-surprising John Updikes twenty-second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Quran, as expounded to him by a local mosques imam.
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 Ahmads 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 Quran: Of those who plot, God is the best.
Review
"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. Timely and topical, poised and passionate, it is a high mark in Updike's career." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"Discursiveness, coincidence and a barely credible surprise ending compromise, but do not critically impair, Updike's intriguing 22nd novel....Updike, approaching his mid-70s, continues to entice, provoke and astonish. Who knows where he'll take us next?" Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Unfortunately, the would-be terrorist in this novel turns out to be a completely unbelievable individual....Though Mr. Updike manages to extract a fair amount of suspense from Ahmad's story, he does so with the heavy reliance on unbelievable coincidence." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Updike...has written something like a teen coming-of-age story, but he wants his 24 moment too and indulges in some gratuitous button-pushing along the way....In a certain regard, Terrorist is an interesting, if failed, thought experiment." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Terrorist leaves the reader ripping through the book to its finale, desperate to find out what happens....Updike's most adventurous and accessible novel in decades, and possibly the summer's most rewarding book for readers who want more than escapist fluff....Terrorist is one compelling and surprising ride." USA Today
Review
"Terrorist is not without flaws. The plot turns on clunky contrivances and coincidences....Nor does the dialogue ring true....Terrorist burrows beneath the surfaces of American popular culture, which Updike traverses so well, to truths worth remembering." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"[F]or all its marvelous writing and philosophical cogency, Updike's Terrorist is an awkward, overdetermined drama acted out by gritty urban characters he can't bring to life....These are characters and this is a thriller that Richard Price should have written. (Grade: C+)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"[T]he richest, most various [novel] Updike has produced in some time...very much contemporary in its apprehension of the difference made by recent events in America..." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Updike's ability to get inside the mind of his Ahmad to deliver the young man's devotion as well as his fear, uncertainty, and malleable innocence is what renders the novel credible and sometimes wrenching in its authenticity." Boston Globe
Review
"Not all of Updike's fiction over the last decade has been entirely satisfying, but Terrorist makes the case the lesson of the real masters is that we can never anticipate them or how they'll end." Houston Chronicle
Review
"Terrorist's pages are scattered with dozens of stylistic gems....What's most welcome is the page-turning pace the book sets right from the start....We go along for this ride with a keen taste of what it takes to become the driver." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"Terrorist fails because Updike doesn't know Ahmad Mulloy....Somehow, for all the textual accuracy, the book never achieves anything deeper than a rhetorical truth." St. Petersburg Times
Review
"Terrorist is a wonderfully sharp work. Part extreme coming-of-age story, part thriller, it is carefully plotted, articulate, and fortified with good writing. But it also has an old-fashioned willingness to make the great problems of the day personal, human-scale, and funny, and it is for this reason that Terrorist is a book to admire and be entertained by at once." Anna Godbersen, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Review
"John Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject at least as soon as he saw the results on the page....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." James Wood, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century--and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series: "A chilling tale that is perhaps the most essential novel to emerge from September 11" (People, Critic's Choice) about an eighteen-year-old devoted to Allah, who's convinced he's discovered God's purpose for him.
The terrorist of John Updike's title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three. Devoted to Allah and to the Qur'an as expounded by the imam of his neighborhood mosque, Ahmad feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping New Jersey factory town of New Prospect. Neither Jack Levy, his life-weary guidance counselor at Central High, nor Joryleen Grant, his seductive black classmate, succeeds in diverting Ahmad from what the Qur'an calls the Straight Path. Now driving a truck for a local Lebanese furniture store--a job arranged through his imam--Ahmad thinks he has discovered God's purpose for him. But to quote the Qur'an: Of those who plot, God is the best.
About the Author
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of the New Yorker and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.