Four decades ago John Updike climbed to No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list with “Couples,” his novel about how the sexual revolution hit suburban America.
“The novel was involved in a kind of wrestling match with a book called “Airport,” remembered the 74-year-old novelist recently. “It overcame ‘Airport’ for two weeks, and then ‘Airport’ regained the lead and, it was a long slow descent, like a rocket coming down.”
Since then, Updike has won many awards, but he has made fewer and fewer rocket ships. The taboos he shattered in the ’60s no longer needed breaking.
But Updike has struck a chord again. His latest novel, “Terrorist,” the tale of a New Jersey high school student recruited to be a homegrown suicide bomber, has launched him back into the upper reaches of The New York Times best-seller list.
“I felt while I was writing that this book had potential for selling a little better than the others,” Updike said, sitting in the office of his American publisher. “But my college education leads me to distrust any book that sells well.”
Speaking to Updike one re-enters a world of Depression-era thrift, where books are meant for edification and college learning is nothing to be ashamed of. Updike mentions he has traveled to the office that day by subway. For lunch he is eating a turkey sandwich on a white paper plate.
For a man his age, Updike has been working extraordinarily hard to promote this book. He has spent two weeks traveling the country. Today, trapped in a conference room, he is like a “human airport,” he jokes, with interviewers coming in an out every 30 minutes.
The word is out that Updike has made a bit of a departure, and so the cameras are rolling. Only “Terrorist” is less off-the-beaten path for him than it first appears. This is, in fact, Updike’s second novel about an Islamic terrorist. His first, “The Coup,” concerned a Col. Gaddafi-like dictator in a fictional African republic.
“Terrorist” is a similar outing in thriller form. The book follows its hero, an American of Egyptian and Irish descent named Ahmad, from Koran lessons to an apprenticeship with a furniture deliverer, to a crucial job driving a truck into a tunnel into New York.
Teenage ennui in N.J.
As the book drives toward its climax, Ahmad chafes at the sloth and injustice that are visible to all in fictional New Prospect, N.J., a run-down former mill town where there is, in fact, little prospect for anyone.
“He’s interested in New Jersey and sees a certain pathos in this society,” Updike says: “the unemployed black and brown youths on corners, the touching little families who receive the furniture they deliver.”
Though “Terrorist” enters through the wormhole of current events, Updike has written back to the core question of all his work: Does America deliver on its vaulted promises? “One of the most interesting things about this book,” Robert Stone wrote in The New York Times Book Review, is its convergence of imagined views about the way this country is and the way it appears.”
For many years, some critics have argued there has been a divergence between how Updike is viewed and how he is actually writing. “Terrorist” was greeted with a barrage of negative reviews, which Updike seems to have expected. “There is a lot to resist with this novel if one gets in a resisting kind of mood,” he says.
Although he would clearly rather have positive reviews, Updike seems to regard them as beside the point now. “We are dealing with a religion that has a history of considerable violence,” he says, “violence whereby Islam so rapidly spread across North Africa, right up the Pyrenees, in a later surge to the gate of Vienna, all that has just faded into historical documents so that we don’t feel the amount of blood that was spilled.”
Studied the Koran
To prepare for this novel, Updike reread the Koran and was struck by the virulence of the language. “There was quite a lot of ‘Combat the infidel,”‘ he says, “and the only verse I can think of off-hand is ‘idolatry is worse than carnage.”‘
Updike’s determination not to underestimate the intentions of terrorists comes from the fact that he saw their handiwork up close. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was in New York to see an exhibit of Wayne Thiebaud paintings. Instead, he wound up watching the Twin Towers fall.
“My wife and I were together on the rooftop of a Brooklyn Heights apartment building,” he says, “not quite knowing what we were looking at at that point. We saw smoke, a lot of smoke, and the jet fuel leaking down the sides of the building. (Then) to our complete astonishment, the first tower fell very neatly. It just sort of slid down.”
Updike immediately began to write about the event. That week, he published a description of what he saw in “The New Yorker.” Soon thereafter, he wrote a story called “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” which examined the attack from the viewpoints of various participants in the events of that day.
Then, while Updike published a novel set in the art world (“Seek My Face”), a collection of short stories (“The Early Stories”), another novel about infidelity (“Villages”) and essays on art (“Still Looking”), younger novelists began to make sense of the event. Writers like Jonathan Safran Foer, Heidi Julavits and Tom Bissell all published fiction that responded to 9/11.
But it was the older writers whose fiction earned the widest audience. After decades of prizes and movie adaptations did not push him onto best-seller lists, Philip Roth landed there with “The Plot Against America,” a what-if tale that, in spite of its author’s assertions, was not about the present tense, capitalized nonetheless off the fear and agitation American readers were feeling.
Several other literary novelists followed. In 2004, Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” became his fastest-selling book to date, thanks in part to the fact that it addressed post-9/11 anxiety. Last year, 73-year-old E.L. Doctorow returned to the best-seller list with a novel about America’s homegrown terrorism of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, while Salman Rushdie put out “Shalimar the Clown.”
Terror veterans
In a way, it makes sense that an older generation should be the one telling America what 9/11 – and by extension, terrorism – means. Updike, for one, can remember the fear of he felt as a child during World War II, when all air-raid rituals seemed like a preparation for the real thing.
“We darkened the house, then all huddled, my grandparents, my parents – my mother and I – in a windowless part of the house. I heard a plane go over. I was maybe 8. That was about the most scared I’d ever been.”
Throughout the Cold War, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Updike refused to believe that “someone would blow up the world for something so trivial.” He goes on to add: “I think the possibility of the world blowing up was something you learned to live with but kind of ignore. It gave the Cold War maneuvering a certain intensity and tension, but by the Vietnam era it seemed pretty likely that it wasn’t going to happen.”
The fact that Updike is somewhat late to this making sense of America under this new climate of fear should not be a surprise. Though “Rabbit, Run” was published in 1961, Updike has said he was actually responding to the strictures of 1950s Americana. Much of Updike’s best early fiction – his short stories – refracts through the lens of a backward-looking nostalgia at life in Pennsylvania.
Even today, speaking of Ahmad, Updike’s point of connection does not run laterally to his own regular churchgoing, but to his own childhood notion of paradise. “I had mundane literary artistic ambitions, but I had conducted a kind of paradise for myself: the New York literary world, and especially The New Yorker magazine. To be published and accepted in them would be a kind of paradise.”
Later that night, Updike enjoyed the fruits of the earthly Eden his words have created for him: a packed house at the New York Public Library, where he sat for an hour-long onstage Q&A about “Terrorist,” offering his opinions of the world, his feelings about Philip Roth (“I’m not sure I want to talk very much about this,” he says grinning gamely, before offering some words of praise).
But it is telling that of all the comments he made that night, the one that earned him the most spontaneous applause had nothing to do with Islam, his novel, U.S. foreign policy, or even his feelings about George W. Bush. It was a simple statement: “I love America,” he said, “and I’m proud to be an American.”
John Freeman lives in New York.
