Critics tend to diminish the efforts of John Updike because they think of the late writer as having been fluent rather than deep, Updike creating concoctions that are entertaining and all too tied together rather than a set of ideas that are riveting. Updike is all about sex and religion and so it might seem weighty but what critics say about these matters are unsurprising and that the forays into politics are embarrassing, especially in his later novels. John Updike’s novel “Terrorist”, one of those later ones, supposedly written after he had run out of things to say, and he just having the need to keep putting out a novel a year, received a lukewarm reception when it came out in 2006 and not because of a lack of timeliness. There were any number of reports in the newspapers of the time about aborted terrorist plots. Instead, “The New York Times Book Review” commentator Rachel Donadio wondered what novelists knew about terrorism. That is the crux of the matter. Reviewers did not see how a novelist could have plausible control of his materials, especially about such an urgent social concern as terrorism. The reviewers thereby showed their distrust of their own literary callings and, more than that, their unwillingness to come to terms with the claim that novels are an account of reality more terse and insightful than those offered by, let us say, journalists, at least when the novel is done by a major writer. Updike creates a trust in the reader (the attentive and/or swept away reader) that what he is describing is real and not just imaginary.
“Terrorist” reworks material Updike has already used. It was not that the novel had been mishandled in 1998 in “In the Beauty of the Lilies”, only that he had gone more deeply within the material in the earlier novel. The portrait in that earlier and major novel of the religious zealot who gets involved in a David Korash like cult and dies in a fire similar to the one in Waco is well developed. We understand the distorted logic that got him there: he recognized the wackiness and the limitations of the cult leader as precisely what made him authentic, like Jesus was, not burdened to be other than himself, and so freed of ordinary criteria of judgment. The new messiah’s apostles lend their own secular skills to the operation, making it go in the underhanded way familiar from religious cults that are both outside and inside conventional religion. People who are good at accounting or gadgets before they convert do not lose that knowledge or the personalities that go along with it. Other processes of a secret society are also acknowledged by “In the Beauty of the Lilies”. Insiders lie to outsiders and the girl who attracted Clark to the cult with her body—kidnapped him, really—can deny him sex now that he is a member, and he understands that in the same ironical way he understands so much about the movement without thereby dismissing it as an illusion. He is now among those who perpetuate the illusion in the name of the higher good, which is the essential truth of the movement, which is that its leader is, in some sense, the Messiah. Clark has also been prepped for sexual humiliation by his own oedipal bondage to his movie star mother, which ties him into the larger world. Many twists and turns to that novel, which mixes the nasty with the saintly, as does so much of Updike’s work.
The only trouble with the last part of “In the Beauty of the Lilies”, which concerns the fourth generation of a family saga which begins with a turn of the century minister who loses his faith, who is followed by a son who can risk nothing and settles for the life of a postman in Delaware, who is followed by a daughter who becomes a movie star and who gives birth to the last of this ever tormented family, only the movie actress rising above the family trait of fecklessness, is that this last part just isn’t as good as what came before. What all the sections accomplish, though, is to avoid fictionalizing their subject matters, which is to set a series of fictional personages within a real context (what most novelists do) or within a context of real events (which is what Tolstoy and other historical novelists do). Rather, all four of the novellas within the novel recall novel writing to its roots as a depiction of what might well have happened, a real report on imagined events, rather than as exercises within the frame of what a novel is as a genre for novel reading publics since the eighteenth century: loves lost and regained; family property inherited or squandered; the saga of generations that overcome or fail to overcome the adversities that intrude or engulf their lives. Rather, you can readily imagine that there was such a movie star who had the skills of Debbie Reynolds and so was a master comedienne, an artist, as well as, in this case, sexually ravenous and hungry for fame, just as you can readily imagine that ministers across America in late Victorian times were converted to Darwinism and did not know quite what to do with their lives after that. I don’t know if that happened, but I can well believe it did, and the Updike novel is “evidence” of that, however one construes the word evidence: that the insight of the novelist is truer to reality than historical evidence, that the writer is steeped in the historical evidence, or that it is so convincingly portrayed that it is evidently true because it is true to the way people will react in certain contexts. The same is true of Updike’s settings. The bleak geography of the last section is more stylized than the small town Delaware life of the post office clerk, with its tale of Dreiser-like trips to the city and his marriage to a woman of an uncertain dusky background. The background is best realized in the first section, a portrait of Paterson, New Jersey so well done that it was criticized by some as having gotten wrong some of the churches and the congregational politics of the time, and Paterson, under another name, perhaps so as to avoid such quibbling, is the setting of “Terrorist”.
Updike is therefore unlike Ian McEwan, a writer who, in “Saturday”, tried to make sense of 9/ll the old fashioned way, by fictionalizing it, by making it the context for his characters and their quotidian activities and their musings about their own lives and the larger scale of things. The novel is set among real events but is a costume drama because the important events are just backdrop for an ordinary novel. Tom Wolfe did something different when he turned the project to land men on the moon into the subject of journalism that found the whole thing funny. Norman Mailer also realized that when he abandon the novel for non-fiction so as to provide an account of the trip to the Moon. He tried to make the Apollo landing fresh, and failed to succeed only because it was so banal in the minds of the astronauts and the public and the politicians most of which could only reach so far as Ray Bradbury to find a catchy reference. Mailer could not help it; he had to report what he noticed was happening. At least Richard Nixon got something right when he said the moon landing was the greatest event that had ever taken place in human history, forgetting that it is obligatory to reward first place to the first coming of Christ. Clearly Nixon meant the most important real event, not the event that was so successfully elaborated into a culture that it had the longest lasting consequences so far. Even science fiction fans know that it will be a while before space travel out shadows that. Updike is therefore out to rehabilitate fiction as a way to tell about current events, something he has always been up to, though self-consciously dealing with the political flavor of a time perhaps only since “Memories of the Ford Administration”, which was published in 1992.
So how does Updike make “Terrorist” a real fiction, which is to say a fiction that works like a report? He does so by hiding his mechanisms in plain sight where they can be recovered through attentive reading or remain able to operate even if notice of them is neglected. His mechanisms, in a word, are operatic rather than what is usually novelistic. There is no long and complex parsing of motives and interrelationships as one would find in Trollope. Scenes are separated from one another, set pieces each one of which is caught up in its individual moods, usually as duets, one time as a comic trio. There is a lot of melodramatic foretelling and a lot of whining. Scenes are static, not much movement within them, the ironies left to the set decoration. There is one duet where the man is naked and the woman is dressed while they sing (which, in a novel, means that they talk) about lost love; there is another duet where the woman is naked and the man is dressed where they sing of a never to be accomplished love. At one point, Ahmed, the protagonist, doubles back on his path so he can notice something happening through a window. Why was this necessary? Conrad would have allowed the narrator to tell us what happened behind closed curtains, while Verdi has Rigoletto’s daughter spy on her lover so that we can get both the betrayal and the reaction to the betrayal at the same time, just as the reader of Updike’s novel can get at the same time both the suspicious activity and Ahmed’s gradually accelerating cooptation by that conspiracy.
Most of all there is the wrenching sense of the gathering doom of a conspiracy or some other closing of the noose that will destroy the participants. That is why you have to be in a good mood to get something out of most operas. With the exception of Mozart, they don’t lift your spirits; they merely intensify your existential dread or your sorrow for lovers bound to be parted. Opera is largely about destruction, not rebirth, the same exception to be noted. That is why so much of Sondheim is operatic.
Updike violates other expectations for how a novel is supposed to go about its business, especially when it is supposed to be informative about the present cultural and political moment. The ideas, “the ideology”, that motivates the protagonists is not as spelled out as it is, let’s say, in George Eliot or Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann. That is because Updike, who uses so many ideas, is not primarily a novelist of ideas. Rather, he is one of feelings, the ideas having an emotional resonance for their reference to larger intellectual systems. Updike gives you a sense of what it is like to feel a set of ideas, in this case those of Fundamentalist Islam, and he has done his homework well enough to find sources for anger and revenge in both quotations from the Koran as well as from its intellectual texture. That indictment of the Koran violates, of course, the conventional wisdom that Fundamentalist Islam has “hijacked” the Koran rather than taken it at its face value. There is a theological controversy in how a believer should go about reading the Koran, and that might seem a petty reason for killing thousands of people thousands of miles away until one remembers that the European religious wars were also about what was the proper reading of a theological text and who had the authority to establish which readings were legitimate. Ahmed gets involved in a sense of melodramatic tragedy which is his problem because he is an adolescent as well as the problem of Islam as a religion, which is Updike’s dual points.
Going for the emotional essence of a doctrine is not unknown to post World War II novelists. I. B. Singer gives a paragraph or two to the intellectual sources that inform his characters. They too are caught up in static moments: Europeans in New York observing the Holocaust from a distance; magicians working their will without the author giving away what he knows about the Kaballah. A. Y. Agron is, as usual, even more overt than Singer. He has the yeshiva boys aghast when they find that the level of discourse at the hearing to decide whether an agunah (a woman who wants her missing husband declared dead) is lower than they are used to hearing at school. They sound like students at Yale Law School. Mailer, working the older tradition, included a debate about whether American soldiers were too soft, and I remember it as quite effective. Philip Roth, in his early “ordinary” novel, “When She Was Good”, referred to the fact that his protagonist had written a dissertation on Henry James without saying what the dissertation said about Henry James. The reference alone was enough to establish both the character and the kind of novel Roth was himself writing.
Updike, however, does not alleviate himself of his reputation as just a cut above a middle brow novelist, a fate perhaps inevitable for someone who started out as a New Yorker writer. Like much of his later works, such as “Gertrude and Claudius” or “Make My Face”, each of which is a triumph in that the first catches just right a sense of “Hamlet” and the second one a very accurate sense of Abstract Expressionist art, it is said to have missed being deep enough or grave enough because it merely plays with its conceit and, indeed, is light weight because it is given over to its clichés. That charge goes back to “Couples”, which everybody enjoyed for its finding a way to depict sex without being pornographic, and yet dismissed as the goings on of suburbanites who should have more to do with their time. Updike was discovering, however, that Phillip Rahv’s “Indian Country” was to be found in this generation (the one just past) on the East Coast in that he was portraying people who found their sexual lives their great adventures and that these great adventures often conflicted with the rest of their lives, especially their family lives. And his sense of the way sex serves as background and sometimes foreground in everyone’s life seemed more accurate than Cheever’s or Mailer’s much less O’Hara’s take on the same matter.
Updike gives his critics ammunition because of his too neat characterizations. The Jewish teacher in “Terrorist” is a feeble moralizer; his Irish girlfriend is sensual and his German wife is gluttonous, and the only African American with a speaking role is a pimp, all of them collectively summing up what is wrong with America and why Ahmed, a self-respecting person, is fed up with it. There must be more to America than that and we learn at the end that such is the case. But those are the characterizations of American life as they are filtered through the head of Ahmed and as America is understood by its Islamic Fundamentalist opponents. Again, people live in their clichés rather than in the more detailed and profound analyses that can be provided, sometimes, by scholars who want to make America and Islam each a profound value system worthy of respect when, in fact, the values, so to speak, of all societies are no more than their clichés, not their deepest understandings of themselves.
Updike is therefore hitting just the right level of generalization. He is neither too close to the individual consciousness, as would be the case with the modernist authors, such as Hemingway or Woolf, nor too close to the grand explanation, as are the aforementioned philosophical novelists, nor too close to the general social structure as that might be portrayed by Steinbeck or Dos Passos or a Fifties sociologist. Rather, he operates on what I would call the postmodern level: somewhere we have a brief awareness of those who follow the local news and hear about David Steinberg (remember him?) or Tawana Brawley (remember her?) and who in major league baseball got into trouble over drugs. All these are petty matters, to be sure, and yet the fabric of the times, and so a fit subject for a novelist who is out to describe what it is he notices (and has now noticed for a long time) rather than what other generations of novelists have been able to notice. Updike’s novels are therefore reports from the various fronts: of the sexual wars, the art wars, the revolution of computer technology and of life in the suburbs, as those are affected by and have an effect on the universal and permanent themes of sex, war, social structure, technology. I miss not having more of these reports.