Terrorist by John Updike

Terrorist by John Updike

From Shawn Stufflebeam, for About.com

John Updike Terrorist is a thriller born of the headlines we read every day. It is the story of the making of a terrorist, sans moralizing and sentimentality. Terrorist is a well-crafted and timely novel from an author who for the past quarter century has been a key figure in American literature

Building Characters
Updike is a true wordsmith, and his characters come to life through vivid and insightful descriptions. He frequently gives the reader enough information to make deductions about the characters that he never states directly. This is the kind of writing that makes you think, and is as much about what the author leaves unsaid as what he puts on paper.

All of Updike's characters are so genuine, each with good and bad qualities, that I wasn't certain which one of them was going to be the terrorist for at least the first third of the novel. Clearly someone was going to be a terrorist, but the obvious choice seemed less obvious as I grew to know all of the players a little bit better.

Tense Suspense
We watch the recruitment process through the terrorist's eyes, and the subtle manipulations that are used to draw the recruit into the fold. I found myself repeatedly thinking, "No, no, no, can't you see that these guys are just using you?" At the same time I found myself acknowledging how believable the whole plot was. As the story progressed I found myself having more and more compassion for the main characters, and more and more dread about the impending destruction.

Superb Thriller
Terrorist is a great novel, told extremely well. John Updike won Pulitzers for Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), two of the four Rabbit Angstrom novels that were recently named among the best novels of the past 25 years in a New York Times Book Review survey. He has published twenty-some novels and continues to add to the hundreds of pieces he has written for the New Yorker over the past half century.

I highly recommend John Updike's Terrorist. Its poignancy and sensitivity are surprising in such an edge-of-your-seat thriller.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/terrorist.htm