Terrorist, John Updike’s latest, has sold more copies in the United States than any novel of his since Couples in 1968. About 120,000 hardbacks are in print; recent Updikes have been running at 30,000-40,000. There has been so much fuss about the book that his publishers actually persuaded the 74-year-old author to go on a publicity tour, the first time he has agreed to go “on the road” for 16 years.
The reasons for this sudden success are unclear. Perhaps it is the pressing topicality of the subject; perhaps the grand old man is enjoying some kind of cyclical resurgence. Who knows? What we do know is that it certainly can’t be the critics, who have largely trashed the book.
Ah, the critics. Let me begin with Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times’ resident Updike-basher. She also assaulted an earlier novel, Seek My Face. This time, she shoots herself in the foot in the first paragraph, and not just by abandoning main verbs. “John Updike writing about terrorism? The bard of the middle-class mundane, the chronicler of suburban adultery and angst, tackling Islamic radicalism and the call to jihad?” Er, so, Michiko, you haven’t read Gertrude and Claudius, The Coup, Brazil, Roger’s Version, the art criticism, and the countless essays and short stories, a vast body of work that would surely convince the dullest, daftest reader of Updike’s capacity to voyage beyond “the middle-class mundane”?
Or how about Jonathan Raban in The New York Review of Books? He starts a long review by praising the brilliance of the realisation of the book’s central character — “The important thing is that Updike makes us believe in his unbelief” — and then ends by dismissing Ahmad’s conversion to terrorism as implausible. So he’s convincing, but, then again, he isn’t. Hmmm. Or there is John Leonard in New York magazine: “The characters in Terrorist may be sketchy, and the action perfunctory, and the stereotyping wearisome...” The Los Angeles Times describes the novel as “saturated in paint-by-numbers angst”. And Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly reports that he “sent Terrorist windmilling across the room in a spasm of boredom and annoyance”.
All of which makes me so angry that I interrupt Ian McEwan’s hiking holiday in France. He is halfway through Terrorist and, like me, loving every word. I mention the critics and he sighs. “Perhaps,” he suggests, “they’re all just weary of a writer who can produce three or four brilliant, quotable lines on every page.”
In other words, Updike is just too good for them. They can’t stand being constantly exposed to somebody who just writes so well. This is, in fact, a minor tradition of modern American letters. Norman Podhoretz — an intellectual grandee: you can tell by his horrible fat-man-on-tiptoes prose — once remarked: “I have been puzzled by many things in the course of my career as a literary critic, and one of them is the high reputation of John Updike.” Ooh, get him. And Gore Vidal described Updike as being “fixed in facility”, as clear a case of the revenge of mediocrity on genius as I have ever heard.
Okay, okay, I’ll calm down. Terrorist is not Updike’s best novel, but then neither is Macbeth Shakespeare’s best play. Or, to put it another way, Updike’s worst — and Terrorist is definitely not that — is way, way better than almost everybody else’s best. He is a very great novelist indeed and, I suspect, the greatest writer of English prose alive. In 100 years, people will look back on those critics with dismay and derision. “He is,” says McEwan, in-between hikes, “a great master of the fine print of existence, the corners of human pleasures and sadness. And he has a frightening level of detachment.”
He offers as evidence a sentence from Terrorist, a moment in an affair between an old Jewish careers counsellor and the Irish mother of Ahmad, the hero. “She slams the bathroom door, but it catches on a woolly bathroom rug and shuts reluctantly, not before in the slice of the light being angrily flicked on he sees her Irish ass, never kissed by the desert sun, jiggle.”
There is not world enough and time — or space — to unpick everything in the sentence, but what McEwan is getting at is the absolute cold precision with which it achieves its effect. Graham Greene said that novelists must have a “splinter of ice in the heart”. At such moments, one feels Updike has a glacier beating in his chest.
You need to be glacial to get to the human. In the course of the same affair, Updike observes, with a typically effortless twist of the knife: “A mistress knows the man to be a liar, where the wife only guesses.” Suddenly, the glacier, without actually thawing, opens up a landscape of heartbreak and tenderness.
There’s another thing about Updike, a very unfashionable thing. As McEwan puts it, he is one of the old-style novelists who “knows the names of things”. He knows the names of trees and plants, of architectural detail, and the makes of cars. In Terrorist, he even knows the bureaucracy of truck drivers’ licences. And he never makes a show of knowing these things; they are just there, as they are in life, ticking over in the background, enriching or wrecking lives. One way of reading Updike is just to learn stuff. Few things are more impressive about his Rabbit tetralogy than the way one actually learns what it is like to own a Toyota dealership.
He can’t even give a lecture without making one gasp at the precision and truth of his observation. I just stumbled on this line from a crusty old attack on the cyberworld. “Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.” I bet some of those critics call themselves “writers”. How, beneath this shadow, dare they?
Okay, now it’s time to stand back a little. Updike is one of the three great patriarchs of modern American fiction, the other two being Saul Bellow and Philip Roth — “Would that we had such fathers in this country,” says McEwan. Bellow, now dead, wrote in the high moral tradition of the novel; as with the great Russians, one is intended to see through the books to the deep patterns and truths of life. His finest hero, Moses Herzog, is paralysed by his inability to turn away from the big questions. Roth is the mighty mind let loose in a stupid world, sometimes like Buster Keaton, but, latterly, more like Jonathan Swift. The past decade has produced some of the most astonishing torrents of prose of our time. The mighty Sabbath’s Theater, a tirade of superhuman disgust, is like being hit by a wave, and then, suddenly, as the tide ebbs, feeling free.
Updike shares with those two an essential commitment to realism, to the high fic-tional vocation of describing a society. In the Rabbit books, he conjured up post-war America with crystalline and imperishable accuracy. But where the other two bring the truth-seeking and poetic rage to the patriarchal party, Updike, the supreme stylist, brings beauty.
His true ancestors in fiction, Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov, were both aesthetes in the highest sense of the word. The entire climate and meaning of their works was determined by the possibility and significance of the beautiful, and the way sudden shafts of beauty — Proust’s mnemonic madeleine, Nabokov’s butterflies on a hillside or that slice of light from Updike’s bathroom — can illuminate and order the world. In fact, as I write this, I realise that Updike’s true ancestor was not a writer but a painter. The beauty of Edgar Degas’s ballerinas always encompasses the pain and mess of their lives. It is exactly the effect Updike repeatedly achieves.
His particular version of the beautiful arises from a rare combination of starkness and sensuality. He still attends church — “I get anxious at 4am,” he has said. “I seem to have this need to belong to some church” — and he adheres to an austere American protestantism suffused with the demanding theology of Karl Barth. But this is combined with a vivid, voluptuous physical pleasure in the world. I’ll never forget — though I don’t remember where he wrote it — his delight in plucking a leaf from a bush as he walked along the street, something about “greenly crushable”. A banality had been given sensual depth. Then, of course, there are his sex scenes, shattering in their bodily truth but still, somehow, lovely and moving. Updike, with the stark mind and the sensual body, was born to be a novelist.
So, what has happened with Terrorist? Why the critical whining and the public enthusiasm? Well, to repeat, it is a very good book. Only Updike could have balanced the central character so beautifully. No, he is not and does not become — as some critics seem to require — a foaming fanatic; rather, he just seems to drift into the role of truck bomber. There’s nothing journalistically legible about this man, but there is a nagging reality about his state of mind that, somehow, makes you see.
And that, I think, explains some aspects of the critical response. They want their terrorists to be explicable in the most banal terms. Kakutani, for example, whines on about “factors” that do or don’t explain Ahmad’s conversion to terrorism. But great novelists know that people do not act according to “factors”. Updike’s Ahmad is as clear an illustration as one could have of the ultimate opacity of the human will.
The public enthusiasm for the book is, I think, a matter that lies far beyond the terms of critical discourse. Since 9/11, the Americans have been seeking authoritative voices to tell them what is going on. Cinema — notably through Spielberg’s underrated Munich and Gaghan’s clever Syriana — has been trying to do this. Journalism, of varying quality, has been trying to take on the same role. Nothing has quite worked. In now turning to Updike, they are simply looking to a man whom they must sense is one of their finest. What does this snowy-haired sage have to say about it? They won’t be disappointed.
As Updike said when he admitted some years ago to considering a 9/11 book: “I think if you’re a writer, you try to make something out of everything that happens.” That includes bombing New York or crushing a leaf between your fingers. And, as McEwan says: “When he goes, we’ll be so bereft.”
Terrorist by John Updike is published by Hamish Hamilton at £17.99
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