John Updike and Why Libs'll Never 'Get' the War on Terror

Newsbusters.org ^ | 6/5/06 | Warner Todd Huston

[Valin]

(For what it's worth)
My take on John Updike


"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."
John Updike

[livius]

Actually, I read the book and I didn't get that out of it at all. The protagonist is a Muslim convert who is a very unhappy young man; his liberal artist-underemployed mother (a fallen away Catholic) sleeps with a variety of guys, his Egyptian dad having run off years ago, and the kids in his school are ghetto thugs who think of nothing but sex and drugs, which is all they ever see on TV. Essentially he is reacting by joining the cult of Islam, which tells him everything to do with his life and directs him on a submissive, downward path that makes him reject learning and culture, but also makes him feel superior because he believes he is rejecting Western "corruption."

Updike is a theological writer, but not that much of a liberal in many ways. The character opposing the Muslim misfit is a Jewish athiest with a fallen-away Protestant wife. His own life is not great, perhaps, but he loves life and yearns for the idea of a good God who loves life (unlike the Islamic "god") even if he does not believe in this God.

I didn't think Updike got the tone 100% right, but I certainly didn't feel it was a pro-terrorist or pro-Islamic book. It was an analysis of people like Johnny Taliban, for example, young Americans from unstable, faith-free backgrounds who convert to Islam because it offers them certainty and a feeling of superiority, like any cult.

[Jane Austen]

I haven’t read “Terrorist” but my understanding is that Updike was NOT pro Muslim, that he was quite critical of the Muslim world. I did enjoy several of his short stories. I read them quite a long time ago and no longer recall the details but would have remembered if there was a liberal bias.