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.

If there's anything harder to read than a pulp novelist trying to write a serious book miles above his pay grade, it is a high-brow novelist trying to write below his pay grade.

Unfortunately, the would-be terrorist in this novel turns out to be a completely unbelievable individual: more robot than human being and such a cliché that the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found the idea of such a person so incomprehensible that he at some point abandoned any earnest attempt to depict his inner life and settled instead for giving us a static, one-dimensional stereotype.