Updike’s Terrorist doubts Western self-congratulation more than Amis or McEwan do.

Evidence

John Updike shares with Amis and McEwan a particularly masculine perspective not always sympathetic to gendered, racial, and cultural Others. He, too, offers critical reading as a path to “convert” the recidivist Muslim. In Terrorist, he is more successful in presenting an appraisal of the contemporary American materialist malaise than in entering the mind of an Islamist terrorist. Even so, his novel is shot through with a greater degree of doubt than the others—doubt not simply in the divine presence devoutly avowed by the young Islamist Ahmad but also in the society that so stridently awards itself all the positive values it denies to Muslim culture. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 63

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘degree of doubt’ variable is exactly what separates a contesting from a reinforcing novel — usable for measuring where Hamid and Naqvi sit on Morey’s implicit spectrum. — connects to: Updike ends Terrorist with unresolved ambiguity rather than clean triumph over faith. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 143; Updike resolves Terrorist’s plot through Protestant assumptions that validate the saving figure — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 140
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Updike ends Terrorist with unresolved ambiguity rather than clean triumph over faith. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 143; Updike resolves Terrorist’s plot through Protestant assumptions that validate the saving figure — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 140

Broader Connections

• Updike resolves Terrorist’s plot through Protestant assumptions that validate the saving figure #complicates (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 140