Revisiting John Updike

I just finished reading John Updike’s Terrorist. Written in 2006, the shadow of 9/11 was still great over America. In this novel, Updike follows the development of a religious young man, Ahmed, and his journey toward terrorism through mentors using the words of the Quran that served as grooming by those wishing to punish America further. Yet, Ahmed is careful and assesses on his own the veracity of what he’s told even as he approaches a certain destiny. The plot here is compelling and definitely worth the reading, especially with the depth and insight to the characters and considering the times in which it was written.

But my purpose here is to revisit the skill of Updike’s writing. He often has sentences of more than 50 or 75 words. They are long. Yet, as a reader, one never feels like they’re too long. He’s a master at use of the comma, the semicolon, and seeding of sentences with italics and, in this book, with Arabic words and phrases. In fact, one feels a sense of intelligence in the writing. Never mind that we’re reading dialog of an uneducated person. Somehow Updike does that convincingly while not ‘dumbing-down’ the story or the narrative. One can feel rewarded by his trust in the reader’s ability to rise to his level. In short, and taken as a whole, the level of intelligence is nothing short of amazing – IMHO.

While Faulkner also wrote in long sentences, my recollection of his writing (which I love) is more closely aligned with active human emotion. His sentences are imbued with it (for a clear example read or reread The Sound and the Fury.) Updike’s sentence length is more intellectual. Just read one of his love scenes in any of his works and he relates it as ‘just the facts’ with a goodly measure of dispassion. He pulls no punches in his descriptions, but they have a somewhat clinical sense to them. Perhaps love-making is not all we take it to be.

I first got into Updike when reading the four novel “Rabbit” series. There we see Rabbit Angstrom as the everyman protagonist. We also get a perfectly penned description of America during Rabbit’s time. The same is true in Terrorist. We walk the streets and drive the roads of New Prospect, the town where Ahmad is raised. We see the ‘downtrodden’ as a class, and its frustration at being stuck in prosperity’s fourth quadrant, and maybe able to rise no further than the third. Updike’s descriptions here hearken to an America worse for wear, where foreigners first came to work in the mills until the mills closed. Nowhere to go, they’re forced to grab onto the edges of the national table, often fighting the dogs for scraps from the national smorgasbord. And here religion offers a higher road, one that bypasses material wealth and eschews the daily grind and battle for supremacy as meaningless – or worse: as truly sinful – and poses the promise of greater things.

Beyond the worthiness of this book, I take comfort in the genius of Updike’s narrative powers and am glad to see the putting aside of writers’ workshops admonition against the use of long sentences. The goal of each sentence should be to say what is intended by the author, and not conform to some merely formulaic approach. Once again, if the reader doesn’t get it, they should find something else to read.

As for the novel itself, I recommend it. From our vantage point almost 20 years after its publication, it’s not a new story and while fictional it’s also plausible – and even, in some ways, hopeful.