Updike's Terrorist: They just don't get it

(Reflections early in reading John Updike's Terrorist, with related thoughts about Graham Greene and W. H. Auden) Haven't had to read far to give the lie to both professional critics such as Maureen Corrigan and to bloggers who all make the usual mistake of attributing the thoughts of a troubled or troubling character to the author. Shakespeare wrote both Edmund and Edgar in LEAR, and Regan and Cordelia, too. So Updike writes a conflicted teenaged boy both drawn to the warmth and good intentions of the "infidels" around him and also drawn to hatred of our culture, and feeling self-hatred, too. That doesn't make Updike the one who hates the US. As usual, Updike has done his research. The boy's own reading of the Koran brings him conflicting passages of mercy and hatred. The fanatically earnest young man draws the interest of an unbelieving Jewish man near retirement; both are disgusted with their world, and with themselves. Both are uncomfortably aware of healthier people around them. When Updike said in some interview that he was trying to "love" the terrorist, he's reflecting the same kind of thought that we get in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter in which protagonist Scobie believes that, "if you get to the heart of the matter," every sin can be understood, if not forgiven - and that's how God must view us. Along the way in Terrorist, we get into the minds of the Secretary for Homeland Security, an earnest man doing the best he knows how in a job that he knows is impossible to do successfully; we meet the boy's mother, and we read telling remarks from a high school choir girl who tries to connect to the terrorist-to-be, who says that the spirit "says 'no' to the physical world" : "The way I feel it, the spirit is what comes out of the body, like flowers come out of the earth. Hating your body is like hating yourself...." Is it coincidence that I was just reading the final chapter of a book on W. H. Auden's faith in his poetry, where the author focuses on Auden's ambivalence towards his own body, which sometimes seemed to him like a broken-down car in which his spirit was unhappily riding? Not a coincidence: it's central to being a thoughtful human.

Updike's Terrorist: They just don't get it | Category: Fiction, Poetry, News & History, Drama