Updike defeats terrorism through embodied fellow-feeling, not redemptive art

Evidence

But, again, whereas in Saturday reason emerges battered but triumphant, in Terrorist the representative rationalist protagonist is pinned down in a culture that is frayed and irrational, built now on consumption and the gratification of desires. In the end, the eponymous terrorist’s mission is defeated not by the redemptive power of art as such, but by a more hesitant, almost pantheistic embodied humanism working through fellow feeling with other living creatures. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Contrast this with the ‘contest’ pole the reader wants for Hamid/Naqvi — an embodied, relational humanism rather than a triumphant rationalism or canonical-literature fetish offers a sharp counter-model.