Liberal writers’ attempts to imagine Islamist terrorists were widely judged failures of verisimilitude

Evidence

Terrorist received an almost universally negative response from reviewers and critics. Richard Gray, noting Updike’s failure to create a believable outsider in the young would-be bomber, concludes that its “brave attempt to imagine the other never really fits together as a meaningful story,” and Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, bemoans the lack of veracity in “the cartoonish stick figure named Ahmad,” who has none of the known attributes of an actual suicide bomber. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 125

Categorization

• SHARE: Kakutani’s ‘cartoonish stick figure’ putdown of Updike’s Ahmad is a nice critical nugget for anyone writing about post-9/11 representation.