Updike’s Terrorist

James Wood is always illuminating, but never more so than when he’s giving a book a sharply negative review, as he does with Updike’s recent Terrorist (reviewed in TNR July 3). My favorite line: “When Ahmad [the terrorist of the title] speaks, he sounds like V. S. Naipaul; but when Ahmad thinks, he sounds like John Updike.”

Wood, as always, addresses the theological dimensions of the novel. While acknowledging Updike’s religious impulses (“the world is uncomplicatedly God’s, and it exists to be lyrically praised,” which “licenses what is best in [Updike’s] writing – his strong will to thank God for His creation by attending carefully to all its surfaces, from fridges to vaginas”), he also highlights Updike’s confidence in redemption by sex. Ahmad begins to waver in his commitment to radical Islam after a sexual encounter, and this illustrates “Updike’s gospel” of sexual redemption: “Sex is both the earthiest of activities, the most human, and the most touched by divinity: not either/or, but both/and. We can have it all. We can rut like rabbits and pray like priests; our rutting is priestly [shades of Cleopatra!]. Theology sacralizes sex, while sex humanizes theology. In this way sex manages at once to rid us of our religious hang-ups, to abolish theology, and also to rid us of our secular hang-ups; it manages to make us theological, to divinize us; it is the perfect spiritual exercise, the soul’s supreme therapy.”