John Updike - political psychologist par excellence

John Updike is widely regarded as America’s greatest living writer. He is a superb novelist and observer of life; and, perhaps surprisingly, a committed Christian. He comes from Dutch Pennsylvanian Protestants and has retained his faith throughout his life, though he doesn’t pretend to be any kind of a saint.

Updike writes very well about sexual relations – and here’s the unusual part: he is quite often describing sexual relations between husband and wife. Very seldom is sexuality in fiction between a married couple. But it is with Updike.

Certainly, he has dealt with adultery – particularly in his earlier novels of the 1960s and 70s, involving couples in American university towns. But there is always a sensibility of conscience present. In all his characters, even the most callow, there is a sense of guilt when wrong is done. But there always remains, in much of his prose, a real appreciation of the bond of marriage, and even of its sacramental significance.

Updike has now turned his attention to the most serious political subject facing our world today. And that is the willingness of young Muslims to sacrifice themselves, as terrorists and suicide bombers, for their religion. And there is shortage of young Muslims who are ready to make this terrible gesture.

The book is called “Terrorist”, and the literary critics, on both sides of the Atlantic, have given it a drubbing. They claim it is not skilfully plotted; that the story relies too much on facile coincidence; and that the Irish-Egyptian protagonist, Ahmed, is not well-realised.

And yet, the book is flying off the shelves. People want to read it because they sincerely want to understand the deep roots of this problem. Because, for the rest of our lives, and for the span of our children’s lives, the willingness of Islamists to commit acts of terror and self-destruction will be an ongoing source of anguish.

Contrary to the literary critics, I think Updike’s book is brilliant. Because what the literary critics don’t get – but what Updike understands so intuitively – is the huge chasm that lies between the secular and the religious cast of mind.

With his protagonist, Ahmed, Updike has described exactly the absolute commitment to a supernatural ideal that is only possible with a faith. He invokes, extraordinarily well, the floppy indifference and relativist secularism which now rules Western ideology, the neo-Cons of the Bush regime notwithstanding.

Updike illuminates the mentality of the young Islamist schoolboy, who despises the flaunting immodesty of modern girls, the strutting stupidity of young modern males, and, above all, “the teachers, weak Christians and non-observant Jews, [who] make a show of teaching virtue and righteous self-restraint, but their shifty eyes and hollow voices betray their lack of belief.” Away from school, the Updike character observes that the teachers’ “lives are disorderly and wantonly self-indulgent…some get divorces and some live with others unmarried.”

The young Islamist is consumed by a desire to purify this realm of sinfulness, this wrong path, and falls under the sway of an Imam who puts him on the route not to faith alone, but to fanaticism.

What the critics don’t like is Updike’s incisive deconstruction of the sham and trashiness of so much of today’s secular culture, which has in effect opened the door to the extremism embraced by young Islamists. John Updike has all too incisively laid bare the shallowness of contemporary “anything goes” secularism, whose phoney tolerance has actually made the rise of fanatical Islam inevitable.

The Catholic Herald/The Irish Catholic. 12 August 2006.