Terrorist, by John Updike

Late licence to thrill for an American master

Shortly after the events of 11 September 2001, John Updike said in an interview that he was working on a novel about the art world (Seek My Face), but that when he heard about the disaster, the work and the subject seemed trivial. Then he realised that writing was his only haven and being a novelist was his "contribution to the civil order". There was always something suspect about this comment: it sounded like a joke that wasn't funny, or a way of avoiding having to think about the bigger implications of the way America had changed. When he followed this novel with Villages in 2004, a fine book but one that suggested a retreat to the former glories of Couples, it seemed likely that this most productive of writers was opting for something close to a quiet retirement, penning books designed only for long-time admirers of his elegant sentence structure.

Instead, he has wrong-footed critics and won a new audience with Terrorist, his most commercially successful novel in years. His change of subject is part of this, but also the perceived switch of genre. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America had a similar success because people thought it sounded like a thriller; Updike's novel genuinely does work as one. It's a strange reflection of our age that the thriller now appears to be the most socially responsible genre while novels about sex-obsessed seniors seem horribly decadent, but Updike has adjusted brilliantly.

Updike has experimented before: in 1997, Toward the End of Time was a science-fiction novel and in 1984 The Witches of Eastwick at least toyed with the horror genre. Both novels were subject to vicious critical opinions, with David Foster Wallace writing an unbelievably harsh take-down of Toward the End of Time and Martin Amis comparing The Witches of Eastwick to horseshit; Terrorist has already suffered similar criticism in America.

This seems short-sighted. I believe these three novels are among Updike's finest, because they provide a different perspective on his enormous ability, and allow him to shock the reader anew in the way he used to achieve through his sexual description and his strange mix of religious belief and casual authorial cruelty, the latter perhaps borrowed from his hero, Vladimir Nabokov.

The biggest shock, aside from the switch of genre, is that Terrorist's protagonist is an 18-year-old. Asmad Ashmawy Mulloy is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by ancestry, and an Egyptian exchange-student father. He becomes involved in a plot to explode four thousand kilos of ammonium nitrate in the Lincoln tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey.

It is not quite as vast a departure as it first appears. Terrorist may be set in New Jersey instead of Updike's usual sleepy suburbs, but as well as Mulloy there is a 63-year-old counsellor, Jack Levy, an insomniac Jew with a fat wife. Far more frustrated than most of Updike's male protagonists, he is also one of his most compelling creations, his sadness at odds with the novelist's usual defiant optimism. As in the Rabbit novels, Updike captures the temperature of the times by what's playing at the multiplex, only now this represents the sad decline of cinematic culture.

In a 1995 review of John Le Carré's Our Gang, Updike wrote about his envy of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum's ability to "furnish solemn escapism" to the "white male power brokers", when he regarded such books as "a suffocating gray impression of armaments catalogues and code nerds and excessively factual dialogue". It's unsurprising that, although Updike gives us a 24-like insight into characters who deal with the terrorist threat via Levy's sister-in-law Hermione, an assistant to the Secretary for Homeland Security, he emphasises their domestic arrangements instead of presenting them as superheroes.

Terrorist is a more successful post-September 11 literary novel than Dead Air, Saturday, The Good Life or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Perhaps more significantly, it is the best late novel from this American master, opening up a whole new intellectual territory for Updike to explore.

Matt Thorne's 'Cherry' is published by Weidenfeld