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    Terrorist
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    Terrorist
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    Terrorist
    Audiobook9 hours

    Terrorist

    Written by John Updike

    Narrated by Christopher Lane

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The ever-surprising John Updike's twenty-second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam.

    The son of a bohemian Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New Jersey. Neither the world-weary, depressed guidance counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad's mischievously seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.

    But to quote the Qur'an: Of those who plot is God the best.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 6, 2006
    ISBN9781423318675
    Unavailable
    Terrorist
    Author

    John Updike

    John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

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    Reviews for Terrorist

    3/5

    338 ratings25 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Starred Review. Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch. Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is 18 and attends Central High School in the New York metro area working class city of New Prospect, N.J. He is the son of an Egyptian exchange student who married a working-class Irish-American girl and then disappeared when Ahmad was three. Ahmad, disgusted by his mother's inability to get it together, is in the thrall of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a storefront mosque and preaches divine retribution for "devils," including the "Zionist dominated federal government." The list of devils is long: it includes Joryleen Grant, the wayward African-American girl with a heart of gold; Tylenol Jones, a black tough guy with whom Ahmad obliquely competes for Joryleen's attentions (which Ahmad eventually pays for); Jack Levy, a Central High guidance counselor who at 63 has seen enough failure, including his own, to last him a lifetime (and whose Jewishness plays a part in a manner unthinkable before 9/11); Jack's wife, Beth, as ineffectual and overweight (Updike is merciless on this) as she is oblivious; and Teresa Mulloy, a nurse's aide and Sunday painter as desperate for Jack's attention, when he takes on Ahmad's case, as Jack is for hers. Updike has distilled all their flaws to a caustic, crystalline essence; he dwells on their poor bodies and the debased world in which they move unrelentingly, and with a dispassionate cruelty that verges on shocking. Ahmad's revulsion for American culture doesn't seem to displease Updike one iota. But Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame (that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work-all are here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel.
    • 4/5
      I had a hard time putting this book down for the first fifty pages and then the last fifty pages--first in getting to know the characters and then in seeing how everything would play out--but I admit that much of the middle of the book was far easier for me to walk away from. I think part of this comes from the fact that the set-up almost tells you where the book will end, and it's just a question of discovering the details of resolution, more so even than how the characters will turn out. And I may, admittedly, have also wanted more from the characters... it felt like Updike was almost playing with stereotypes in order to make them more real, and overcome their stereotypes, but at the same time... at base, they were stereotypes. And with a plot that was, for the most part, predictable and easy to see coming, if sometimes a bit contrived, this was one of those books that I suppose I'm glad to have read, but it was also easier to digest in small doses, and I'm not entirely sure I'd recommend it except for in very specific cases.
    • 4/5
      Very true reality.
    • 4/5
      It's a good story but it does not have a satisfying ending, it's a happy ending buy somehow, unsatisfying. It feels like a made for TV movie.
    • 4/5
      Terrorist is the story of a disaffected 18 year old Arab-American who slowly and inexorably gets caught up in a terror plot. While a fascinating portrait of alienation and a sharp social critique, there are some jarring elements to the novel that brought one out of the story and diminished what was otherwise a very good, suspenseful tale and a timely exploration of disaffection and the search for belonging.
    • 4/5
      This was not the typical Updike novel , much more of a page turner and depicting a very different character than usual. However it was an interesting and insightful venture into this world of an 18 year old , Ahmad Mulloy, who in the absence of never knowing his Egyptian father, seeks the Islamic connection with an iman in his local North Jersey neighborhood ( Basically where I grew up in fact). He is tremendously influenced by him and the Qur'an, so much so that he is willing to give up any college direction in favor of driving a truck, a skill that will come into play for the very climatic ending of the story. The tale is rounded out with the inclusion of his high school guidance counselor, Jack Levy, who not only sees more potential in this misdirected kid , but sees a chance for long forgotten romance in his Irish American mother. Jack may be the closest thing to the Updike character we know, the reflective older man dissatisfied with what he has done with his life. The novel gives a good account of the thinking that is involved as this easily influenced teenager looks at our way of life as materialistic, straying from the path of God. Scary to the degree of how easily you can understand how a terrorist is born.
    • 3/5
      I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, Updike painted some believable, complex characters. But though their dialogue was pitched just right most of the time, there were many places where they spoke more like Updike, and a several places where Updike inserted his point of view into their speech, producing several jarring asides on The State Of America Today. (Which is part of the point of the book, sure, but he would have done better to keep his asides to characters who would plausibly speak them.)

      If the dialogue had been more consistently believable, I would have enjoyed the book more than I did.

      (I should note that the only Updike I've read was Rabbit, Run, long ago and probably before I was really the target audience; I don't remember a bit of it.)
    • 5/5
      TERRORIST (2006) is the first Updike novel I have read in several years, and it was his last. (He died in January 2009.) It is a book quite unlike his previous novels in that it could easily be classified a "suspense-thriller," not a label I would ever have assigned to an Updike novel before. But here it is, an absolute page-turner, with the usual Updike eloquence and meticulous attention to the smallest of details. Updike also seems to have abandoned his usual Pennsylvania and New England settings and stepped over into Philip Roth country, setting his story in northern New Jersey and creating a memorable protagonist/anti-hero in sixty-ish high school counselor Jack Levy, a disillusioned secular Jew. But make no mistake, the result is still pure Updike, particularly in its depictions of sexual situations.Ahmad, the product of an Irish-American mother and an absent Egyptian father, is a youthful protagonist you will not soon forget. His self-chosen and atypical 'uniform' of starched white shirt and black jeans is perhaps representative of his black-and-white view of right and wrong and the glaring disparity between his islamic "straight path" and the godless ways of the infidels that surround him. Fatherless, brotherless, and all but motherless, Ahmad has been instructed in the Koran from the age of eleven by a shady imam in a shabby store-front mosque. Ripe for the picking, he is recruited as a soldier in the jihad. And here's the thing: Updike has constructed a precise narrative that seeks to explain and understand exactly how a jihadist - a terrorist - is born. And he succeeds admirably, because Ahmad is certainly not a monster. He is a flesh-and-blood young man who simply wants to do what is right and good. As opposed to all the evil, greed, and vice he sees all around him. He is coached by his closest mentor, Charlie Chehab, in how the "jihad and the [American] Revolution waged the same kind of war ... the desperate and vicious war of the underdog ..." and "One revolution led to another ... Revolution never stops."Updike peppers his narrative with quotes from the Koran, in its original Arabic, with English explanations, as supplied by Ahmad's imam and as Ahmad himself interprets them. Ahmad learns of the Prophet Mohammed astride a white horse, and Ahmad's own vehicle of vengeance is a white truck carrying a deadly payload.But enough. Filled with suspense, filled with trademark John Updike craftsmanship. A new and odd combination, but it works perfectly. Be prepared to read late into the night, because TERRORIST will keep you up, turning those pages, wondering ... This may have been Updike's last novel, but it shows him at the peak of his writing powers. I miss him. Very highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      Updike fails to meet the challenge of telling a complex and contemporary story without resorting to stereotypes. He attempts to write about the radicalization of the lead character, Ahmad yet we only meet three Muslim characters - Ahmad, his imam Shaikh Rashid and his employer Charlie. This makes the story thin and hard to believe. I'm not sure how much research Updike did into the religions he draws upon - Christianity, Judaism and Islam. True, he does quote from the Qur'an, but the fact that any further discussion is limited to either Shaikh Rashid talking to Ahmad, or Ahmad's internal dialogue makes me wonder how much research Updike did - at the very least it seems a 'plain vanilla' discussion of Islam from a non-believer's point of view. Ahmad's school teacher (Jack Levy, a Jew) does mention the Torah, but only in passing and with no reference to its influence or impact on contemporary life (it would have been good to see a character from a Howard Jacobson novel wander into the story at some point). The women in the novel are a puzzle - why Joryleen goes from a member of a church choir to being a prostitute is glossed over, and would have been an excellent story to weave around Ahmad's radicalization. But Updike sidesteps this issue because, I suspect, he can't really deal with effectively telling a woman's story. Final gripe and spoiler alert - how does Levy work out where Ahmad is taking the truck? (I'm trying not to spoil the plot here). That bit of the novel annoyed me - it seemed incredible that Levy wouldn't call for some kind of back up if he'd worked it all out by himself....So in short, a thriller that includes some skilled descriptions of the environment where the story is set, but with a lot of flaws. Best bit for me - the name of the high school bully - Tylenol Jones 'His mother, having delivered a ten-pond infant, saw the name in a television commercial for painkiller and like the sound of it.' (p15)
    • 3/5
      Starred Review. Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch. Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is 18 and attends Central High School in the New York metro area working class city of New Prospect, N.J. He is the son of an Egyptian exchange student who married a working-class Irish-American girl and then disappeared when Ahmad was three. Ahmad, disgusted by his mother's inability to get it together, is in the thrall of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a storefront mosque and preaches divine retribution for "devils," including the "Zionist dominated federal government." The list of devils is long: it includes Joryleen Grant, the wayward African-American girl with a heart of gold; Tylenol Jones, a black tough guy with whom Ahmad obliquely competes for Joryleen's attentions (which Ahmad eventually pays for); Jack Levy, a Central High guidance counselor who at 63 has seen enough failure, including his own, to last him a lifetime (and whose Jewishness plays a part in a manner unthinkable before 9/11); Jack's wife, Beth, as ineffectual and overweight (Updike is merciless on this) as she is oblivious; and Teresa Mulloy, a nurse's aide and Sunday painter as desperate for Jack's attention, when he takes on Ahmad's case, as Jack is for hers. Updike has distilled all their flaws to a caustic, crystalline essence; he dwells on their poor bodies and the debased world in which they move unrelentingly, and with a dispassionate cruelty that verges on shocking. Ahmad's revulsion for American culture doesn't seem to displease Updike one iota. But Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame (that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work-all are here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel.
    • 2/5
      I hate to give a poor rating to a John Updike novel, as I generally love his stuff, but this one just didn't grab me. It tells the story of an 18 year old high school senior who is a devout Muslim in a hardscrabble New Jersey town. I have found Updike great at getting inside the heads of his protagonists, in brilliant and fascinating ways- but I don't think he does so here. Usually his subjects are people like him, but getting in the head of a young, half-Egyptian, half-Irish boy growing up in the 21st century is beyond him- I don't find the internal dialogues convincing.I've decided to give up on the rest of the novel- I got 100 pages in (of 300). Life's too short.
    • 4/5
      I haven't really enjoyed the other Updike novels that I've read. I just couldn't get into the Protestant suburban characters he wrote about, but this book is gripping. While some reviewers have criticized the shallowness of secondary its characters, Updike was able to draw my sympathy for the main character and to simultaneously admire and be horrified by his quest.
    • 4/5
      Seemingly shallow and predictable, John Updike has written an exciting and gripping novel that is hard to put down. It is easy to believe that this is a book full of platitudes. That is because we read about and think about the books theme all the time, ever since 911. Imagine future generations to try understanding our epoch: this books will spell it out for them, in amazing detail.If any readers feel there is not much to learn about the main character and his ideas, there is surely enough to ponder about contemporary American culture. We may not share the same feelings as the main character, especially not with the same intensity, but the author has added numerous illustrations about which, surely, many readers will nod disapprovingly, especially somewhat older readers. A catalogue of virtue and vice is presented, and readers are invited to consider, as Ahmed considers them.I am not a great fan of Updike, although I will concede that Updike writes really very well. Great prose. I feel most of his books are technically very good, and apparently written with great ease, but apparently without real interest, as if the writer's heart is not in it. That feeling even arose reading "Terrorist". However, once I got into the book, it got to me. The story is compelling, convincing and beautifully written.
    • 1/5
      Well, simply put, this book reads like a cheesy paperback, or comes across like an episode of some TV detective mini-series. Everyone was a stereotype, everything so predictable where deus ex machina saves the day. Updike uses beautiful prose when describing something, but that's about it. It's disappointing to see a theme such as this which could be explored in all its levels and nuances, be treated in this shallow and rather cheap way.
    • 2/5
      Deciding whether Updike succeeded in portraying a complicated development of a terrorist, or if he merely expressed a cliché and gave it stereotypical life, the weight of my feeling hedges toward the later. My uncertainty arises due to his well developed tone of sarcasm and irony with which he populates the novel, perhaps overpopulates. Though an intriguing representation of hysteria and fear pervasive after 9/11, I wonder if his intention does not become muddled in the disdain he evinces toward his main character, indeed, most of his characters. While reading about Ahmad and his mixed ethnic upbringing, his rather flighty mother, the high school counselor with decent intentions and a wandering eye, and the rapaciously stereotyped mullah, I could not shake Updike's pejorative presentation of them and the events to which they subscribe, collude, and surrender. Perhaps this falls entirely within Updike's plan, to build a distance from the characters, but it provoked a less involved and less interested reading from me. I longed to have some measure of sympathy for Ahmad, despite the stupidity and gullibility of his youth, even a fraction of a desire to slap him upside the head would have been better than the indifference I felt. The thread of Ahmad's fanaticism and objection to the sybaritic consumerism of his American home and surroundings was also tantalizingly insufficient; Updike had the opportunity to offer scathing reproach through Ahmad, and instead it felt merely like the whining of a spoiled child, an insouciant attempt to proffer justification for Ahmad's later actions. Without this involvement of character I felt like the novel was a hollow platform to criticize attitudes toward terrorist activity, edging precariously near racist propaganda, lacking the strident support of satire, the subtle nudge and wink to let the reader become aware of the hypocritical nature of most terrorist discourse.
    • 1/5
      This is the first book by Updike I'd ever read, and will also be the last. To call the characters "wooden" would be generous. Most of them are not characters at all, but simply racist, sexist stereotypes with no discernable human emotion or motivation. The plot is neither imaginative nor realistic. The language is awkard, unpolished, pedestrian. I cannot believe that Updike is considered a great writer. If indeed he was a ever a great writer, that greatness must have been completely exhausted by the time he wrote this book. I can only assume that some people consider it great because of the timely theme.
    • 4/5
      In the October, 2008 issue of AARP's Magazine, John Updike reflects on the effects of aging on writers. He admits he may not be as creative as he once was, but opines that he can still put together a series of well-wrought sentences. He also notes that reviewers tend to appraise his most recent work not against other modern writers but against his own (almost universally admired) earlier work. He is right on both counts.Thus, the reviews of his last novel, "Terrorist," generally were not kind. I had a hard time imagining a bad Updike novel, so I bought "Terrorist," admittedly at a substantial discount.Remarkably, the book is something of a thriller with a nail-biting inducing ending! Who'd'a thunk it of the old guy. Although all the principal characters exhibit many of the stereotypical traits of their ethnicity (what fun would it be if they did not?), each remains multi-dimentional. I think some critics didn't like the remarkable coincidence that the wife of the lover of the mother of the duped young terrorist is also the sister of the administrative assistant of the Secretary of Homeland Security (got that?)!! And so the plot (of the terrorists, not the plot of the novel) is disrupted. Dont worry, it all seems plausible.Other critics thought the main character was a bit too naive and wooden in his unreasoning devotion to Islam. But what other kind of person could volunteer to become a suicide bomber? Updike is particularly harsh on the holy Quran--while never making an openly disparaging remark about it, he has the audacity to quote it extensively. No editorializing necessary: it alternates between extreme intolerance and vacuous drivel. No wonder Allah speaks only in Arabic: in English, he is alternately blood thirsty and vapid.Updike could show Mohammed a thing or two about stringing sentences together. How about this somewhat typical description of a building:"The great high school and its several outbuildings were then walled off by Italian bricklayers whose work was latter topped by glinting coils of razor wire. The immurement was piecemeal, as a running response to various complaints and incidents of damage and explosions of spray-painted graffiti. The defaced, rusting fortifications created areas of unintended privacy, such as some square yards of cracked concrete alongside the half-buried yellow-brick edifice housing the giant boilers, originally coal-burning, that send steam furiously knocking, into every classroom. One yellow-brick wall holds a basketball backboard whose hoop has been bent at a nearly vertical angle by boys imitating the dunk-and-hang style of NBA professionals." In all, a fitting addition to the great oeuvre of a great writer, who may not be as good as he was in his prime, but in his 80's is far better than 99% of other writers in their 30-50's.(JAB)Addendum by JAF:I would like to clarify that my husband is not anti-Muslim, just anti religious texts. He would make the same critical remarks about both the Old and New Testaments.
    • 2/5
      Really interesting, from a different point of view perspective. Worth reading, and I didn't think it would be.
    • 1/5
      Okay, I didn’t exactly finish this one, but I’m finished with it. I gave it 105 pages. Do you want to know what happened in 105 pages? Ahmad met with his guidance counselor, went to church, and went to a lesson with his Qur’an teacher. That’s it. I was so bored with this that I couldn’t even bring myself to care about the blatant anti-Americanism and misogynism. The red light started flashing when I hit the 18 page description of a church mass (or whatever it’s called when it’s not a Catholic church). By the time I hit the 11 pages describing his Qur’an lesson, I was more than done. I need some plot!
    • 3/5
      On the surface, this is a book about a disillusioned Arab-American boy who falls into a terrorist plot and the guidance counselor who tries to save this boy of great potential from going astray. In reality, I view it as a study on the dehumanization of the American melting pot in the late 20th/early 21st century.1. Updike's character development of how a boy moves from being disillusioned to being a terrorist strikes true. Despite earlier reviews that speak of his "imbalance" because his father was not there, I don't see Ahmad as imbalanced at all. His decisions were not made due to lack of father figure. They were made based on his disillusionment and detachment from society and the attachment offered by his local mosque.2. All other characters are more like caricatures. Even Levy, the guidance counselor with a heart of gold trying to save the one golden child is a painting of a painting rather than an original. I may be being harsh - this may have been part of Updike's detachment theme.3. There are way too many deux ex machinas within the late plot (won't say too much) but the way that DHS gets involved and happens to have someone who knows a kid who may know something is a bit much. Perhaps, again, this is Updike saying that we need to get back to connections to gain attachment as Americans. But who knows?All in all, a mediocre novel. Worth reading to read it but only once.
    • 4/5
      Reviewers have trashed this book by one of my favorite authors, but it's not as bad as they've said. It helps that the reader of the audio version is terrific. He gives interesting but not overdone voices to the main character, an Islamic convert who's the son of an absent Egyptian immigrant father & an Irish American mother as well as to the other characters, including a secular Jewish disillusioned public school guidance counsellor and his fat wife, a female African American classmate who tries to befriend our hero, and a Lebanese American furniture store owner & his son. This list, though, betrays the novel's great flaw: its cast of characters are all types rather than real characters. (The "fat wife" is a particularly offensive stereotype.) Moreover, the older characters--& even some of the younger ones--give voice to an annoying grumpiness about developments in American culture.
    • 3/5
      Honestly, my gut reaction was disappointment on multiple levels. For one thing, the relationships between the main characters rang false; I could imagine them existing (and being interesting) alone, but their interactions throughout the plot seemed implausible. Unfortunately, even more disturbing was the way that Updike presented the interaction between Islamic extremism and American culture. At first, the teenaged protagonist seems like a vehicle by which Updike will attempt to give readers a glimpse into why 'they' might 'hate us.' But then the plot veers off into different psychological territory, in that this particular hater (an American-born teenager, oh my) is apparently emotionally disturbed more as a result of poor parenting and attending a lousy high school than by religious or political differences. Was Updike trying to suggest something deep and compelling about the nature of terrorism...? Like that it's more a product of poverty and alienation than Islam? If so, he did a pretty blah job of it. By the end of the book, I had become tired of searching for reasons to be more impressed.Overall, the whole thing struck me as little but a string of caricatures -- the depressed Jew, the frustrated young Muslim, two Brassy Women (one artsy Irish mom, one sassy black teen) and a Scary Imam -- strung together by a flat plot inspired by (and capitalizing off of) 9/11. Yuck.
    • 2/5
      Not nearly as good as it could have been.Seemed "flat"Updike is a mysogynist!
    • 3/5
      The story follows a teenage boy whose now-absent father was an Egyptian and whose mother is American of Irish descent. He turned at the age of 11 to Islam as a means of making sense and gaining control of his life. Now he's 18, getting out of high school, and finding himself wrapped up in the world of fundamentalist Muslims. There are some amazing, beautiful passages in this book, but at the same time, not all of it resonates. A bit of a mixed bag, but worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Ah, to get a book out of the library on the first day it hits the shelf - such joy. But as to the specifics of the book, it's an interesting attempt to get in the mind of a young, serious Muslim-American. As with all Updike, you sometimes get the sense that SERIOUS STATEMENTS ABOUT AMERICA ARE BEING MADE. But, especially as the book progresses, character and plot flow more naturally. It's even suspenseful at the end.