The ever-surprising John Updike’s 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 Qur’an, as expounded to him by a local mosque’s 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 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.
BOOK REVIEWS
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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. Full Review (559 words).
Media Reviews
Booklist
Starred Review. [Terrorist] deserves also the label of masterpiece...timely and topical, poised and passionate, it is a high mark in Updike's career.
Kirkus
Updike.... continues to entice, provoke and astonish.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Updike has distilled all their flaws to a caustic, crystalline essence.... his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel.
Library Journal
Updike's always beautiful prose and his ever-probing imagination trace what happens when worlds collide.
The New Republic - James Wood
John Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject--at least as soon as he saw the results on the page ....
What is most striking about this novel is that, despite Updike's massive familiarity with the technical challenges of fiction-writing--this is his twenty-second novel, for goodness sake--he proves himself relatively inept at the essential task of free indirect style, of trying to find an authorial voice for his Muslim schoolboy.
The Boston Herald - Larry Katz
The fate of a famous New York landmark depends on the answer. To get it, you’ll have to spend many pages considering Koranic injunctions with Ahmad, whose frustratingly close-minded search for truth only confirms what we already suspect: There’s no fun in fundamentalism.
New York Times - 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. It seems meant as a fable, and any good fable requires some derring-do. The most satisfactory elements in "Terrorist" are those that remind us that no amount of special pleading can set us free of history, no matter how oblivious and unresponsive to it we may be. And that history, in disposing of empires, admits of no innocents and spares no one.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Amilina This book is strange We've read the book in our class. It took a long time until we finished and it was horrible. Nobody in my class likes the book anyway. I've never read a book like this and I would have stopped reading the book after the first pages, but because of... Read More
War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that AS Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark.
A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, exploring how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths.
Brilliantly evoking the long-vanished world of masters and servants, Margaret Powell's classic memoir of her time in service is the remarkable true story of an indomitable woman who, though she served in the great houses of England, never stopped aiming high.
Vivid, daring, and unforgettable, The Printmaker's Daughter shines fresh light on art, loyalty, and the tender and indelible bond between a father and daughter.
I read The Healing in two sittings it is a fascinating story of plantation life at the beginning of the Civil War. Granada, a slave newborn child...
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The Uncommon Reader is a novella by novelist and playwright, Alan Bennett. The story starts with the Queen coming across the mobile library van...
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Arizona bills Amazon for $53 million in uncollected sales tax(Feb 06 2012) The ongoing sales tax battle between many US states and large online retailers, most notably Amazon, continues with a thrust from Arizona which, last week,...
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