Updike Aims to Stretch Readers' Sympathy

June 4, 2006 — -- The author and "New Yorker" contributor John Updike, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his "Rabbit" series, has a surprise in store for his devoted fans. His newest novel is written from the perspective of an American-born suicide bomber. The controversial thriller "Terrorist" hits bookshelves this week, and Updike says he's ready for any backlash.

John Updike: I thought I could animate from inside a home-grown terrorist, and present at least some of the other sides, and see what indeed makes young men -- and now some women -- commit suicide, blow themselves up, turn themselves into human bombs, really a horrific new way of waging a conflict.

My hero is called Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy … and he is a party to a terrible deed. However, he is a boy trying to make sense of his life and trying to be a good Muslim. … And it's not so unlike what we ask of our soldiers, to sacrifice themselves or risk death on behalf of a cause, of a set of ideals.

D.H. Lawrence somewhere said that the business of the novelist is to, um, stretch your sympathy, to take it to unexpected places.

There have been a few plays and novels, and I even wrote a short story in the immediate wake of 9/11, but I think it does take time for art, as it were, to digest the news.

I probably will be chastised possibly for being a little insensitive to the reality that I'm trying to allude to here. The reality is grim, was grim; and the future, insofar as it's tainted by another, is grim. Nevertheless, it was a human event, and I think it doesn't hurt us as humans to try to understand the men who brought it off, and the men who are buoying themselves up right now.