Old Master in a Brave New World

By Lev Grossman

John Updike has appeared on the cover of this magazine twice, once in 1968 and again in 1982. The first time was for Couples, his then scandalous, still shocking novel of suburban partner swapping. The headline read THE ADULTEROUS SOCIETY. When he made the cover again, having just won nearly every literary award in existence for Rabbit Is Rich, the third in his four-volume Rabbit saga, he rated a somewhat tamer caption: GOING GREAT AT 50.

Updike is fond of that second cover. "It made me look smooth and kind of enigmatic," he says with a wry, twinkly smile. "All the things I want to be." And if he were on the cover today, what would the headline be? "STILL ALIVE, AMAZINGLY!" he suggests, getting even wryer and twinklier. "STILL ALIVE--AND WHY?"

With his 22nd novel, Terrorist (Knopf; 320 pages), Updike answers his own question. Terrorist is the startlingly contemporary story of Ahmad, a high school student in a crumbling New Jersey town whose zealous Islamic faith and disaffection with modern life make him a pawn in the larger, fitfully violent conflict between Muslim and Christian, East and West. They also make him a powerful voice for Updike's abiding, ongoing critique of American civilization, as well as a uniquely tragic individual in his own right.

At 74, Updike remains one of America's great stylists--his prose is the literary equivalent of high-definition television--and one of its most pitiless observers. As Terrorist demonstrates, his gaze hasn't wavered, even though his feelings have never been more mixed.

TIME: WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT AN 18- YEAR-OLD ISLAMIC EXTREMIST?

UPDIKE: I think it was the sense that I could see why Muslims would hate the West, and the U.S. in particular, because so much of what we take pride in and enjoy tends to militate against a simple, ardent faith. I felt I could express this idea, that I had some insight. I don't know why I felt that. I wasn't an especially pious youth.

YOU MANAGE TO MAKE A REAL CONNECTION WITH AHMAD, A YOUNG MAN WITH WHOM YOU DON'T OBVIOUSLY HAVE A LOT IN COMMON. I got very much into him and liked him, sympathized with him, even admired him. He's in some ways like me as I remember myself. But he's more pious and more cool, more composed. Not this disheveled, eager-to-please, puppyish adolescent, which is my image of myself. He's not so puppyish. He has a deadly streak too.

PEOPLE FEEL VERY PROPRIETARY ABOUT THEIR ETHNICITIES THESE DAYS. ARE YOU WORRIED THAT PEOPLE WON'T ACCEPT A BOOK ABOUT AN ARAB AMERICAN COMING FROM YOU? It's a question of whether or not you're going to be scared by all this ethnic awareness and possessiveness into writing about nothing but septuagenarian, Eastern-born Lutherans. You get boxed in by your own fear of making a misstep. I'd rather risk having various minorities complain. You have to risk it. It's part of the fun of it. Unless you're willing to stretch, you're going to limit yourself to a kind of self-parody in the end. No, you have to take that risk. And you do it cheerfully, because it's liberating to try to imagine an Arab American. He's not a very average Arab American, in any case. He's sort of one of a kind.

AHMAD'S DISGUST WITH WESTERN CIVILIZATION MAPS NEATLY--NOT TOO NEATLY BUT MORE NEATLY THAN YOU'D EXPECT--ONTO THE CRITIQUE OF LATE 20TH CENTURY AMERICA THAT WE SAW IN THE RABBIT BOOKS: THE DISGUST WITH JUNK FOOD AND OBESITY AND POP CULTURE. And waste, the American waste. I find myself very disturbed lately by the fact that restaurants give you more than any sane person would want to eat, and food is packaged in bigger and bigger containers now so that you try to buy a mere quart of ginger ale and you have to buy a gallon of it that won't fit in the refrigerator. I'm very aware, almost for the first time in my life, of consumerism, being a dupe of consumerism.

In my old age, as my appetites lessen, I guess I'm more and more easily disgusted by the fact that we're living in this society committed to making us spend more than we have, or more than we should, for stuff we don't really need or want, and that furthermore is killing us slowly as well as filling all the landfills and making the birds sing less and so on.

THAT'S A RATHER BLEAK SENTIMENT. THIS NOVEL FEELS A LITTLE BLEAK TO ME TOO. Is it? I think novels always feel bleaker to the person that reads them than the person that writes them. I guess I do feel the decline of America, let's call it, and without being any less of an American myself, the piggishness of us all. Clearly, there's going to be a global crisis in the amount of petroleum in the world. There's only so much, and there are more people wanting it. No wonder the Third World is sore at us. We're spending the limited reserves of resources about as fast as we can. Our solution is to waste it all and then punt and see what we might do next. It's very easy to sort of look back and think that things were better then, that things were better, purer, more straightforward, honest, and there was a future.

BUT YOU DO FEEL THAT WAY? I THINK THAT'S GENUINELY HOW YOU FEEL. I don't buy into doom scenarios. I've lived through all that, living under the shadow of the A-bomb and the H-bomb, without getting discouraged or hopeless or frantic. It might just be a kind of mindless optimism, sort of more genetic than thought controlled. I do tend to trust this country to come up with the right answers eventually. And I tend to trust the people in government, even though I didn't vote for them. So in that way, I'm not a pessimist--I'm not a naysayer. On the other hand, when you look at the world as it evolves, you can't help but miss things.

THIS BOOK IS BEING PACKAGED AS A BIT MORE OF A THRILLER THAN YOUR OTHER BOOKS. It's not a way I've written often. But there is a kind of hearty pleasure in writing when something worse might happen than the woman stalking out and slamming the door. Somebody not going to bed with somebody. I've written so much circumscribed by the domestic reality and peacetime. I have very little experience--I haven't fought in any of the wars that I've been a passive witness to, and I haven't had much violence in my life--so there is a kind of a rush about actually trying to imagine violence and flesh it out, dramatize it. Because it does occur. You just avoid it as much as you can.

THERE ARE VIRTUALLY NO BOOKS MENTIONED IN TERRORIST OTHER THAN THE KORAN. IT'S ALMOST A BOOK-FREE WORLD. I think America is an increasingly book-free country. In the world of my boyhood, there were books everywhere. Your piano teacher had books, and there were lending libraries everywhere--your department store had a lending library. Books are still bought, and you see them being read in airplanes, but it's a last resort, isn't it? And the category of "literary fiction" has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier. But now, no, I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit. I was hoping to talk to America, like Walt Whitman, you know? Address it and describe it to itself.

ONE OF THE CHALLENGES OF THIS BOOK MUST HAVE BEEN RENDERING THE WAY YOUNG PEOPLE TALK. ALWAYS RISKY FOR AN OLDER WRITER. You don't want to make it feel like you ran out and bought the latest version of the teen slang compendium. I don't know, maybe I did a laughably feeble job. I just tried to hear it, hear it as I imagined it. I figure this is my little world and not anybody else's.

Present teen attitudes are in a way part of what the book is about, isn't it? These things are possible not just because of suicide bombers in Iraq but because of high school students in Colorado or New Jersey or anywhere else who are actually planning massacres followed by their own deaths. This is so beyond what was present in my high school, I think. This kind of friendliness toward death, this feeling that it's not such a big deal to kill or die, is after my generation. And you begin to say, Why? There are so many people in the world that I think the notion that you are dispensable begins to catch everywhere. And that also, in an economic situation that seems like a dead end to everybody, like this one, I think it's easier to be willing to die.

WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES POLLED CRITICS LAST MONTH ABOUT THE GREATEST WORK OF FICTION IN THE PAST 25 YEARS, YOUR RABBIT NOVELS WERE MENTIONED. I didn't see that.

I HATE TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU THAT YOU WEREN'T NO. 1. Listen, anything ...

I THINK RABBIT TIED FOR THIRD WITH BLOOD MERIDIAN. Cormac McCarthy.

YOU AND CORMAC MCCARTHY. Ahhh, together again. I've never been able to read much of him, between us. No doubt the failing is mine. But better to be third than not at all.

DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT RETIRING? I've reached an age when everybody else is retired, of my peers, more or less. As a writer you're self-employed. There's nobody to tell you to pack it in. It might be a mercy.

HOW WOULD YOU GO ABOUT RETIRING? I GUESS YOU'D JUST QUIETLY FALL SILENT. You'd fall silent, [submissions] would start to come back, there would be embarrassed conferences with your editors, and eventually you would see that, in fact, you were senile. They're very slow to realize that, I think, people are. But for now I'll push on a little longer.

I FEEL AS IF IN THE PAST 10 OR 15 YEARS YOU'VE BEEN IN A RESTLESS, EXPLORING MOOD, PUSHING YOURSELF BEYOND THE REALM OF THE TRADITIONALLY UPDIKEAN BOOK. YOU'VE WRITTEN MAGIC REALISM AND SCIENCE FICTION AND NOW A THRILLER. Part of my setting up shop was the idea that I should produce a book a year--that this was a better way to run being a writer than to think of yourself as a kind of a priest-prophet, the way American writers like Norman Mailer--the esteemed Norman Mailer--did. Now, with modern medicine, and modern Protestant lifestyle, I've lived long enough that the books keep coming--time to write a novel, time to write a novel. So you look for things that will amuse you and in some way challenge you. A different world.

My one best seller ever really was a book called Couples, about American domestic life in the '60s. I felt I had something to say about that. I had the feeling as a child that there was something more going on in this household--with the discontents of both parents, and the tensions, and even the kind of comedy that we perpetrated for our little in-house audience--that all this was more complicated than most fiction was showing. And so I began with the premise that there was more to say about domestic life. I can bring some new light on that.

So sure, I've been looking for escapes and ways to vary my reach. I do want to vary my song as much as I can while I'm still singing. Because I won't be singing forever.

To read the first chapter of Terrorist before the book hits stores, go to time.com/updike