Why Updike delved into suicide killers’ psyches

Witt: You have said that you were struck by the sense of “friendliness of death.” Is that part of “Terrorist,” that sort of nihilism?

Updike: To call it nihilism, they would object very much, because to them paradise is quite real and the number of virgins and the kind of couches, which are spelled out within the Quran or in the tradition of Mohammed called the hadith. I don’t think of the religion as intrinsically hospitable to death, but, as I have said, there has been a tradition of shahid, of the suicidal bomber. It wasn’t just Islam actually, it wasn’t just the suicide bombers in Palestine and Iraq that intrigued me and got me upset, it was also the American youths who with a kind of Nazi ideology have plotted and carried out massacres in their high schools.

Witt: Like Columbine?

Updike: Yeah, like that and their imitators, because there will be imitations now. We are living in a world in which we don’t give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

Witt: You have said in a recent interview that you were hoping to talk to America like Walt Whitman to “address it and describe it to itself.”

Updike: That’s how I conceived the author’s role when I set out on this procession. Yes, the audience is America, your fellow Americans. And the rise lately of the phrase "literary fiction" disturbs me because it implies that there is literary fiction meant for the literary connoisseurs, just like poetry is for a limited, special audience. And what I set out to write was fiction, pure and simple. My first books were in mass market paperbacks, after their hardcover runs; it was thrilling to see them on drugstore racks and airport racks. I don’t see them there anymore. So, for whatever reason, the author is not harkened to. But even Whitman with his grandiose talk addressed very few people in his lifetime. But yes, your ideal audience is your fellow countrymen and you’re trying to say things of interest about your country.

Witt: Do you think that in some ways literature makes it easier to create a dialogue about ideas?

Updike: Yes. Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies, and I certainly was trying to do that here and in my other books as well. In the “Rabbit” books I was trying to show in many ways a not very useful member of society who nevertheless had a case to be made for him. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. [The tension] is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

Witt: There’s been so much talk about the world changing after 9/11. Was it a marking point?

Updike: Well, it can be exaggeration its importance. But having nearly 3,000 people killed in the midst of a big city in a spectacular set of explosions and collapses is certainly something that hasn’t quite happened to America in this way. We haven’t seen such violence on our own soil since the Civil War. So, in that sense it changed [our world], and it’s changed the way we go into airports and buildings. But I think you can exaggerate it really. There were terrorists before; there were hijackings before. And what changed the world for me is the constant pain of the headlines from Iraq and Israel and from Palestine, the bombings and the apparently endless, and increasing, bloodiness of the insurgency in Iraq. It is sad to me that in a world that has so many positive things going for it that there should be so much bloodshed and conflict, and conflict that could be reconciled. But anyway, a novelist can’t give political directions but he can try to describe the world as he sees it. And the “Terrorist” is my take on a certain slice of America, and a certain, let’s hope, unusual America.

Witt: You have also said that you feel that America is in decline, and yet you say you’re not a pessimist. Why are you still optimistic?

Updike: By decline, I probably mean that it’s changed since I was a boy, more crowded, but it’s also kinder in a way. And I think the global economy is getting out from under us. The mighty dollar is not mighty anymore. Our cars are not the favorites and the rest of it. But you can always see signs of decline around you, and I think that America has a few more miles on its tires yet. So, in that sense I’m an optimist. I believe in the Constitution. And I believe in the resilience and the basic understanding and adaptability of the American people.

Witt: Did that also figure into “Terrorist”?

Updike: There’s pessimism there and a dark view there. But on the other hand, the book has its up side too. I don’t want to give away any endings. But it’s not all doom and gloom in that book.

Witt: Well, that concludes our interview with John Updike. Mr. Updike, thank you so much for joining us.

Updike: Thank you.

If you’d like to view an interview with John Updike on “Today” and read an excerpt of "Terrorist", click here.

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