The Coup

by John Updike

John Updike is one of America's most versatile men of letters. His characterization of Rabbit Angstrom in RABBIT RUN, RABBIT REDUX and RABBIT IS RICH has made the author richer than Rabbit. But in THE COUP, Updike dissects a modern African state called Kush. Narrated tongue-in-cheek by Kush's exiled president, Colonel Felix Ellellou, Updike proves he is an equal opportunity employer when it comes to slicing up bunkum, whether black or white, first world or third.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Africa, American, Literature, Novels, Classics

318 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

He died of lung cancer at age 76.

Reviews

[brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

when extolling the virtues of capitalism -- “the worst economic system, except for all the others” -- to the commies, pinkos, marxists, fags, and anti-americans i pal around with, my favorite defense was formerly the fool-proof statement that ‘nobody washes a rented car’. the final section of the coup is my new favorite. it’s totally outrageous and funny and also kind of seriously depressing.

we have one hakim felix ellellou, islamic marxist dictator of the tiny (and fictional) african nation of Kush. after deposing the king and kicking out all the ‘white devils’, he’s left to figure out how to make the country work by the laws of allah, marx, and benevolent totalitarianism. no easy task, eh?

as it’s written by john updike, the coup is filled with linguistic flourishes that destroy. check this bit as ellellou unwraps the blade he’s about to use to chop off the king's head:


Think of the blade of that guillotine, wrapped in straw and burlap to protect its edge, but perhaps gaps worked loose in the wrapping causing glints of reflections to fly across the desert as the pack-camel swayed on its way as it brought humanitarian murder to this remotest and least profitable heart of Africa.

The handle of the scimitar, bronze worked to imitate wound cord, nearly fell from my hand, so unexpectedly ponderous was the blade. In this life woven of illusions and insubstantial impressions it is gratifying to encounter heft, to touch the leaden center of things, the is at the center of be, the rock in Plato’s cave. I thought of an orange.


just preposterously good, huh? here we go:

riding through his drought-ridden country, ellollou notices, at one point, 'two yellow parabolas' off in the distance. much later they are revealed as the ubiquitous 'golden arches', home to the big mac and chicken mcnugget and all that other disgusting slop.

you see, way out in the Kushian desert, the americans secretly set up a town modeled on small-town USA: manicured lawns, drug stores, fast food, coca-cola, movies, diners... ellollou flips his shit, grabs a microphone, and screams to the people of the town:

“What does the capitalist infidel make, you ask, of the priceless black blood of Kush? He extracts from it, of course, a fuel that propels him and his overweight, quarrelsome family – so full of sugar and starch their faces fester… I have visited this country of devils and can report that they make toys that break in children’s hands, and hair curlers in which their obese brides fatuously think to beautify themselves while they parade in supermarkets buying food wrapped in transparent..." blah blah blah… you get it.

(of course, it’s all kinda true. updike takes many the shot at capitalism and america. i think the rascal was a closet anarchist!)

worth noting that the monologue is shouted while the smell of wafting donuts fills the air, while the americans hand out free beer, and while hot women stroll around in short shorts. ellellou urges them to give up the beer and burn down the town. yeah... i wonder what they're gonna do?

here’s what follows:

Ellellou, known to his co-workers only as Flapjack, served as a short-order cook for three months, before grease burns compelled him to take employment as a parking attendant in the city’s one multi-level garage.

genius.

if we had substituted big macs for bombs, playboy magazine for bullets, britney spears for blackwater, and monday night football for abu ghraib… baghdad would look like downtown cleveland right now.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

John Updike, you FAILED me!! I've read 6 of your novels--I'm a big fan--but The Coup was a crappy, CRAPPY book. Too much description, too many adjectives and metaphors, Updike, and not enough story. It's not laziness, it's routinization.

Here's my take: in 1978 Updike was at the absolute midpoint in his great literary career. Funny things happen at the midpoint. At the midpoint, artists (writer, musician, actor) have for several years cruised off the genius that made them early career superstars. Their styles have gotten more refined, but not more diverse. By stepping out along the same artistic branch for so many years and so many books, Updike became a writer of even more depth and sense, but by 1978, he was too far out on that branch, and it began to sag to the ground. This is the proverbial "coming-back-to-earth" for the superstar. In music, think of the third albums by The Dave Clark 5, Quite Riot, Creed; in cinema, think Godfather III, Rocky IV, Star Wars IV Phantom Menace; in acting, think Mickey Rourke, Molly Ringwald, C. Thomas Howell.

Updike usually writes about sex, politics and race, and The Coup is no different. Unlike his earlier works where sex, politics, and race was concocted in an inflammatory mixture during the 50's and 60's, by the late 70's the admixture of these cultural topics was uninteresting and cloyed, no matter how original the characters and milieu. Updike has overplayed these topics, written himself into a box, and the result was The Coup--a book as intricately BORING as anything I've ever read.

It's unfortunate, but absolutely characteristic of that stagnant artistic midpoint. 'Unfortunate' because the book has potential. It's a story of an African man educated in Wisconsin and briefly acquainted with mid-western culture, only to return to Africa, and by a turn of events, becomes the President of a corrupt, destitute, impoverished African country. The story is interleaved between presidential cronyism and his memories of America. Interesting concept, yes. But Updike, instead of providing a streamlined story with momentum, got BOGGED down with his characteristic writing--

adjectives
analogues
similitudes
hyphenation
allegory
sentences long as paragraphs
metaphors
similes
wordplay

In The Coup Updike went too far out on his branch. His writing overpowered the topic. He's a great storyteller of the common, mundane, ordinary, but this...this was overwritten. Updike found himself BOXED in by his writing, and instead of constructing an opening from which he could have written himself free, he was found repeatedly barricaded in a construction of words that enclosed him, closer and closer, with no escape that could be provided by word, topic, or story. Updike seemed, to me, more concerned with a unique turn of words and the interplay of syllables than he was for effectuating a rich, interesting story. Updike got himself into verbal eddies where he circled around and around in froth, and the story suffered. Here's some examples.

...in her sleep her stringy, lustreless hair--so different from the soft and wiry curls that adorned, cut close or braided in ornate patterns, the skulls of Ellellou's Salu sisters, and three of his four wives--had drifted stickily across her face; her hair held red streaks amid the black, and the kohl with which she had beautified her eyes had smudged. The dusty brown of her cheeks showed in the slant light linear shadows of a single diagonal tribal cicatrice, one on each cheekbone. The noises about them in the slum, the banging of calabashes and scraping of warm ashes and the unwrapping of hashish packets concealed in the fasces of rattan below and the buzzing of children's recitation from the Koran school across the steep ochre alley, made it hard to return to sleep, his salat as-subh performed, and Ellellou lay there beside her hard-breathing unconsciousness like a thristy man lying on the lip of a well, conscious that the nation was dying, that the dry sounds he heard, of rattling, scrapping, unwrapping, reciting, were hopeless sounds, scavenging sounds, of chickens too thin to slaughter pecking at stones that would never be seeds... (p. 59)

...hung on the far wall between an Ife harvest-drama mask and a Somali saddle-cloth of an exceptionally elaborate pattern. Sittina, who bore the name of a Queen of Shendy, had furnished the spacious living-room of the villa in a scattered "artistic" style with sub-Saharan artifacts whose solemn blacks and browns, whose surfaces of red-stained animal hide and hollowed gourd still redolent of the organic matrix from which they had been gently lifted by the last stage of manufacture consorted with the glib rectilinearity and mechanically perfect surfaces of the Danish armchairs and glass-and-aluminum coffee tables that had been salvaged from the pillage of the European quarters in 1968. The whole room, with its cracks and gaps and air of casual assemblage and incompleted intentions, seemed an insubstantial sham compared to a room I could suddenly remember, of white-painted moldings and unchipped knickknacks, of impregnable snugness and immovable solidity, tight as the keel of a ship, carpeted wall to wall, crammed with upright, polished, nubbled, antimacassared furniture including a cabineted television set and a strange conical table of three platterlike shelves that held a gleaming trove of transparent paperweights containing in their centers crinkled paper of plastic flowers, evil eyes of all colors whose stare seemed a multiform sister to the grave gray-green Cyclops stare of the unlit television screen, all this furniture in this exotic far-off room sharing a feeling of breathless fumigated intrusion-proof cleanness that pressed on my chest as I waited for someone, love embodied, as perfect and white as the woodwork that embowered her, to descent the stairs; the varnished treads and slender balusters did a kind of pirouette at the foot of the stairs, a skillful cold whirl of carpentry that broke, by one of those irruptions to which my mind was lately prone, through the dusky mud tints of Sittina's villa, the tender fragility of things African, the friable dishes and idols and houses of earth moistened and shaped and dried again, of hides and reeds crumbling back to grass and dust, of the people themselves for their bright moment of laughter rising out of the clay and sinking again, into the featureless face of Allah, which it is the final bliss for believers to behold, through the seven veils of Paradise... (p. 72)

TOO MUCH!! It's like this for 318 pages, and the story is obscured and inconspicuous behind the mass of these words.

I believe this was one of those 'filler' books that keeps the paycheck in the mail. Similar to actors who star in cheesy flops well beneath their acting potential merely to generate revenue. I betcha if Updike was still alive, and I asked him where he assigned The Coup in his pantheon of books, Updike would tell me it's very low.

New words: ersatz, anfractuous, doxy, impasto, propinquity, punctilio, funicular, haptic, elision

[Philip · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Coup by John Updike ranks as one of the most disappointing reads I have ever encountered. It’s disappointing because I expected better from an author I have read repeatedly with great interest and enjoyment. So why is there a problem?

The Coup is in places a delight to read. John Updike was the master of the epithet. He could sum up a situation, a relationship, a description with a pithy, imaginative and funny sentence or two, passages that are always worthy of quotation. This review could be a list of linguistic swagger culled from this book, all of the examples memorable, but eventually all of them meaningless. They read like bravura, showing off for the sake of it.

So the process of reading The Coup is good, enjoyable, if superficial. The experience is often spectacularly funny and indeed insightful. The language is always hugely and highly decorative, if overdone here in there, especially in long paragraphs of concocted description of a place that exists only in the writer’s rather limited imagination. But this criticism is nit-picking. Certainly, John Updike is a master of the technicality of his art.

So what is the real problem with The Coup? It’s the scenario, stupid.

The enduring strength of John Updike’s Rabbit books is the way he embroidered what felt like, at least, potentially, real lives of real people in real places. Rabbit lived in the United States, and lived through, even exemplified, some of the observable, and experienced transformations that affected that society during his fictional lifetime. But John Updike did not set Rabbit in a fictional country somewhere in North America, surrounded on the outside by recognizable people, places, seas, and mountains, and incorporating on the inside all the issues, politics, prejudices and controversies of the age. Rabbit inhabited a real place, not some concocted fictional amalgam of other people’s prejudices about the United States fictionalized as a made-up nowhere.

The setting of The Coup is Kush, a dry desert land, formerly a French colony that has access to the Red Sea, identifiable countries as neighbours, Coca-Cola in stock, Islam prevalent, and oil in the ground. There are East German advisers. There is Marxism, Cold War, Soviet interest, and even China gets into the mix as far back as 1978. There is colonialism and there is inter-religious conflict, but not yet developed in the seventies as the vehement dominant issue it became in the decades that followed. There is wealth. There is poverty. There is jockeying for power. There is travelling overseas, specifically to the United States to take a college degree. There is the experience of Black Power, and non-white identity. And then there is a return to the not-quite-identifiable African homeland to embark on a career in politics. And the result is a mishmash of ideas, placed nowhere, located anywhere, with relevance to nothing. Given this admixture of ideas, philosophies, conflicts, you name it, and the result is a rant, simply an author’s rant.

It is a mix that is, frankly, incredible.

And that’s the problem. All the ideas are good. The writing is virtuosic. The epithets are quotable. The people in the book, however, are convenient jumbles of ideas, inert hatstands on which John Updike can conveniently hang precisely what prejudices he wants. I did finish the book, but I struggled, and I never felt I had been invited into this, frankly, incredible world.

[Hamish · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my birthday this year, my partner organized a weekend trip to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where Updike lived in and around for most of his adult life. We tracked down the various houses he and his family lived in, went to a show at a wolf sanctuary (highly recommended!), drank at Ipswich Brewery, explored an old mansion, etc. It's a cute area, albeit one that feels very sheltered and exclusive. Incidentally, it's 97.6% white. Readers of Updike's work are unlikely to be shocked by the fact that he voluntarily chose to live in a place surrounded by people just like him. Why would they be? All of his work stars people that are transparently just like him. And even when he ostensibly stepped outside of his milieu, as he did in the Coup, it still feels like he's writing about himself. It's a novel about the ineffective dictator of a fictional African country, and yet it still reads like just about every other Updike novel and its protagonist, despite being superficially clothed in Islam and anti-Americanism, feels like just about every other Updike protagonist.

This is not necessarily a condemnation: I like Updike's work and find its predictability oddly comforting and endearing, if sometimes frustrating. And here we're treated to the usual supply of his wonderful prose; the sections intertwining the narrator's memories and his present are particularly effective (and Banville-esque). It's occasionally quite funny, particularly its juxtaposition of our dictator's carefully considered and employed official state ideology and the population's complete disinterest in said ideology. It's also quite surreal and bizarre, traits that are generally only hinted at in Updike's other work. But somehow the tone never quite works; something always feels off. The engine fires but it never quite catches.

There's also Updike's omnipresent difficulty with writing female characters who are anything other than shrewish, and the sense (especially at the end) that he's making a Big Philosophical Statement, only one veiled behind a layer of irony (both of which I find distasteful). The irony in particular becomes burdensome and tiring over the course of 300 pages. The strength of Updike's craft is enough to overcome these flaws, but this is certainly not one of his stronger works.

P.S. A Russian military officer in the novel is named Colonel Sirin, which was of course the pen name of Updike's hero (and mine), Nabokov. The second half of the novel also feels like an intentional allusion to Lolita with its bizarre road trip (via camel) and disappearing female love interest.

[Bookcase Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first Updike, and now, certainly not my last.

I admit, I found it unnerving to really get into The Coup when I started it. The often archaic vocabulary and overly laden sentences are not particularly 'reader friendly'. And yet, as I considered putting it down in favor of another -lighter - novel, I kept turning the pages only to quickly find myself a quarter of the way through.

I soon found Updike's prose, in its depth and complexity, delightful. The subtle humor ever present, and Ellelou a lovable and believable madman of a dictator; at once larger than life and at the same time all too mundane (and sane) to be a true madman dictator.

But it's the timeless observations that stand out more than anything. The America described in The Coup, as experienced in the 50s and 60s by Ellelou, is the America of today. Updike could have written it last year. Take the obsession with self-help books that Ellelou had noticed: "How to Succeed, how to be saved, how to survive the mid-life crisis...how to make dollars in your spare time. The endless self help and self exploration of a performance-oriented race that has never settled within itself the fundamental question of what a man is."

This stands in sharp contrast to the colorful but impoverished society of Kush, spiritually wealthy yet bereft of most material necessities, even rain. It's the severe drought that prompts our hero to embark on a mad pilgrimage in the search of rainfall.

The narrative style and events almost give the novel an air of fantasy, certainly of the fantastic, and once you've become acclimatized you're well along for a literary adventure that's going to be hard to beat.

Like I said, my first Updike, but certainly not my last.

[Rodger Payne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The central narrative is interesting but Updike has over-written this book with so much description. I quickly abandoned the dictionary though Updike flashes a vocabulary that surely causes virtually all readers to gloss over some textual meaning.

It was my least favorite Updike to-date.

[Norbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see the beginnings of "Brazil' in this book, though in this case the character creates an alternative reality, not the author. Infinitely more readable than Gabriel Garcia Marquez' portrait of a dictator, yet still rings true.

[Paul Steer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to like The Coup. It’s been a long time since I read his rabbit books of which the first few I thought were works of genius , but this was such hard work , I just battled through it out of loyalty. Perhaps I totally missed the point ? A great disappointment

[Joey · Rating 2 out of 5]

John Updike, bard of the 20th century American middle class, attempts in The Coup to write a farce on Africa's series of islamic and socialist governments that arose in the wake of decolonization. Unfortunately Updike is not Kurt Vonnegut, who's novels like Cat's Cradle did well to successfully lampoon the "third world" and its relationships to the west. Updike struggles with the tone and the absurdist nature of the book, which is at strong odds with his normal hyperrealism. Updike tries to counter this, and to employ his usual society analysis through a focus on consumer goods, by throwing in flashbacks to the African protagonist's education in suburban Wisconsin. While some contrast is nice, Updike is over reliant on this trope, and a book promising a critique of African political ideology quickly becomes a study of American college life in the early 1960s. Finally, Updike's refusal to commit to either first or third person is... exhausting.

[Chris Wharton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, for the good old days of US-Soviet Cold War rivalry pitched in desperate Third World countries, of cadres and Young Turks, of coups (present-day Myanmar excepted) and beheaded kings. Here, in 1973 (the year I first went to not-very-desperate Thailand in the Peace Corps), newly empowered Colonel Félix Hakim Ellelloû tries to steer a course of Islamic Marxism, a doctrine of purity and privation, for his country of Kush, a former French colony stretching across vast Saharan emptiness in its north to tropical profusion south of the river Grionde, which divides Kush both topographically and culturally and upon whose banks sits its capital Istiqlal. In his zeal, sharpened during years spent in the 1950s at a liberal arts US college and exposure there to Nation of Islam antiwhite, antimaterialism, and anti-America ideologies (which he brings back to Kush, along with a white American wife—in Kush, “She Who Is Wrapped” and one of four wives permitted him by Islam), Ellelloû wanders (with a wife or mistress) the desert north in disguise, discovering there ludicrous instances of both Soviet and American neoimperialism, the latter (unbeknownst to him, the President!), an oil installation and company town that could have been transplanted from his US past. Behind his back in Istiqlal, meanwhile, his ministers, officials, and clerks are succumbing to temptation, sleaze, corruption, and American entreaties. Flashbacks to his American days and romance entertainingly undergird all this, with Updike capturing and parodying the self-important ideological posing and posturing of establishment and radical politics of the fifties-to-seventies decades. As well (and in addition to the usual sexual exercising), Updike puts his flairs for observation, description, and linguistic lyricism and playfulness to good use in the alien settings (especially desert sights and sounds) and cultures of north central Africa, far removed from his usual place in middle-class American suburbia.

Four stars (I add this due to the one-star ratings that sometimes appear on my Goodreads phone app).

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF - I’ll give the book an additional star for having a few humorous moments, but overall it was an overly descriptive slog, and the author made sure that the reader knew that he owned a thesaurus and that he had certain infatuations, which he illustrated through his off-putting characterizations of the women in the story.

[Gubly]

A book that taught me about it

[Mark Malone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I rate this book 3 of 5 — GOOD. It was extremely difficult to read because of Updike’s use of: 1) an excessive number of seldom-used, archaic synonyms of more common English words (e.g. “tintinabulated” for the word “rang”), and, 2) so many African words for plants and animals and clothing and diseases and weather events, etc. I mean who had any idea what boabab, euphorbia, pangolin, hyrax, coussabe, lungi, kwashiorkor, or harmattan meant before reading “The Coup.” Eighty-six (86) times I had to look up the definitions of words or expressions to understand the meaning of sentences or paragraphs. Also, the flashbacks in time and space make the plot (such as it is) hard to follow. On the other hand.....
Once I did my vocabulary homework and once I re-read many passages 2 or 3 times, I thoroughly enjoyed Updike’s observations and insights into human nature, the Islamic faith, and the political systems of the world in the late 1970’s. And Updike’s use of unique similes to describe natural settings or the physical traits of people is clever and even breathtaking at times.
Therefore, I rate this book Good rather than Excellent or Outstanding because of how difficult it was to get to the “golden nuggets” within in the greater “miner’s pan” of the novel.
-Mark Malone

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Rabbit, Run was a bit of a pleasant surprise, this book was not. The misogyny in the other book was at least balanced out by a somewhat interesting take on male Peter Pan syndrome, death of the American dream, etc. In the Coup you just get misogyny with some racism. I can imagine that Rabbit has some real life similarity to Updike, so even though the character is unlikable, it feels genuine. Writing about an African dictator and his relationship with his wives and fall from power seems to both engage in paternalism and fantasy.

[Christelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I started to read this novel, I thought "hum... this feels like a book which has aged". Well, I was wrong. Even though it refers to Nixon's era, the comments and situation are quite contemporary, especially in this time of economic crisis, as we are facing our consumerism tendencies. The development of the story in the colonies, is also quite interesting and is written with a lot of irony. Once again, although the era of colonies is over, the results of these experiences in Africa is still felt today.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this first-person story of a Middle-Eastern dictator's fall best of all the Updike's I've read. I didn't feel called upon to like the protagonist, and yet at times I did like him (and I do like a sympathetic protagonist, shallow woman that I am). His illusions are not my illusions, but he does seem to be a realist about his self-created predicament.

I found in this book that I was able to enjoy Updike's beautiful writing style without being repelled by his characters.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

fast paced, readable, whimsically amusingly but convincing account of teh rise and fall of an african exchange student who becomes the anti-american dictator.

[Neville Tirimba Ogoti · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oboriki bonde obobe ekerage. Ting'ancheti egetabu eke nonya ng'ake.

[TheBookWarren · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars - I like Updike’s mood here, more thoughtful,
Metaphorically minded & it suits his natural prose & with the supposition that’s more hopeful & grounded.

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

A deposed Central African dictator writes his memoirs on the French Riviera and reminisces on how his country slipped from colonialism to monarchy to his brand of Islamic Socialism, and finally to that most seductive of systems, Capitalism.

Hakim Felix Ellellou, supreme leader of the fictional state of Kush (probably located where Niger is today) lives the perfect life with his four wives (each from a different tribe, including an American he picked up during his studies in that country) and describes the world in a flowery tongue full of ideology, philosophy, and poetry. He despises America where he encountered only racism and consumerism. “Consumerism, the triumph of the unnecessary. You stink of French soap. I cannot make love through the smell of our exploiters,” he says to his mistress Kutundu, a woman he procured from a village dung heap on one of his tours about the land, and now installed as his advisor.

He visits drought-stricken areas to survey the damage caused and finds a Soviet nuclear silo with its soldiers drunk and debauching. A bit further up the road, he meets an American aid provider with a supply of provisions for the thirsty masses of his country. In a fit of rage, swearing that rain must come naturally and not be produced artificially, he kills the American and destroys the aid shipment. He next visits the northern badlands of his country where there is rumoured to be the stolen head of the former king, whom Ellellou murdered on the advice of Kutundu, who has now become an oracle and is spewing treason against the dictator. Upon his arrival he finds the oracle’s cave has spawned a tourist mecca around it, developed by the ruler of the neighbouring state who is a capitalist lackey. In another fit of rage, Ellellou destroys this centre too. He next visits a remote border town that is rumoured to be also under capitalist siege and finds it has been named Ellellou and become an oil town, replete with that most hated of Americanisms, consumerism.

At home his enemies are conspiring to oust him, and Kush is moving under the orbit of America, despite Ellellou’s best efforts to the contrary. His third outburst of rage, in the oil town of Ellellou, does not work for him and he is thrown in prison. But “a peculiar problem of African government is the disposal of the bodies of the disposed,” his enemy Ezana, former Minister of the Interior, says, and so, in an ironic twist, Ellelou is allowed to live because it is easier to propagate the myth that this economic progress is due to their beloved dictator rather than attribute it to regime change.

This is a farcical rendition of a fairly realistic situation that has occurred in most developing countries after they got independence from the colonial yoke: a dictator takes over and becomes hostage to one of the superpowers; and when he is not towing the line anymore, he is replaced.

Ellelou and his gang spew some great lines of political acuity:
“Revenge is an international no-no. We have, instead, realignments.”
“International capital has decided that colonies are obsolete.”
“A tyrant takes everything personally, an expert doesn’t.”
“The battle now is between the armies of necessity (Socialism) and the armies of superfluity (Capitalism).”

Despite the important moral of the story, its gravitas was lost in the endlessly flowery descriptions and beautiful sentences that I suspected Updike was revelling in, to the point of pretension. The more the pretense, the more the farce, and the less the import. But how does a white American writer portray the pulse of Africa otherwise? He is not Chinua Achebe to approach it from the inside, and so farce (some might call it magic realism, as he made out with his other novel, Brazil) will have to suffice.

To Updike’s credit, I have to appreciate his artistry in covering such subjects that were so out of his range of lived experience; to write this book, he had only visited Africa briefly as a Fullbright Lecturer. Updike took on tough topics, even if it was to view his country as the Ugly American in Africa in this novel.

[Jonathan Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Updike takes a hard left-field turn in this novel about a fictional African nation called Kush and its Islamic Communist leader named Felix Ellellou, who must not only wrestle with the nation’s drought, the suffering of his people, the encroachment of American capitalism, and the duplicity of his advisors, but also his relationships with his four wives. The novel interweaves Ellellou’s backstory, mostly in relation to his wives, with his “spiritual” trek towards discovering the cause of the drought.

Unfortunately, the unusual setting turns out mostly to be a mirage, as Updike spends most of the novel immersed in his favorite themes of sexual-relationships-on-the-rocks and the lack of spiritual meaning and fulfillment in an increasingly materialistic age. This is a shame as when Updike does venture into genuinely new territory, such as the scene where Ellellou beheads his old mentor and the former leader of Kush only to have the head make a surrealistic speech later, he’s able to generate moments that are genuinely captivating. This isn’t to say the setting plays no role, as Updike’s detailed, immaculate descriptions do bring the desert to life; but unlike in, say, Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, he doesn’t imbue the setting with much of an atmospheric or even aesthetic weight.

As always, even though I say it on nearly every Updike novel, the style is ravishingly gorgeous; though I’m beginning to suspect that Bloom’s criticism of Updike as “a minor novelist with a major style” is correct. Despite his inconsistency as a novelist, I keep reading him because I’ve found no other author that can turn out sentences or paragraphs of such breathtaking beauty and power. Much like Thomas Hardy, Updike was arguably a poet first and foremost. That proves to be a boon in his short stories where he must worry less about the ability of style to carry a coherent and engaging plot and characters across many pages, but consistently proves a stumbling block in these longer novels that can rarely maintain any sense of momentum, and especially seems out of place when dealing with the actions of a nation’s leader.

I often get a feeling in these Updike novels that the characters have been wiped clean of motivations and emotions and in their place are endless descriptions of landscapes or rooms or architecture or thoughts that are bizarrely disembodied. Ellellou doesn’t end up as repulsive as Tom from A Month of Sundays, but he’s not really sympathetic, or engaging, or interesting; and his history as a student in the US seems a thin façade for Updike to write familiarly about a character whose origins/heritage and concerns are (or should be) quite unfamiliar. The end result is another mess of a novel, one that definitely has some highlights, but not enough to salvage it from sub-mediocrity.

[Towelette Petatucci · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Rooms, I thought-the world had become a ball of rooms, a hive, where once it had been a vast out-of-doors lightly dented by pockets of shelter"

is this a good book? that's the prosaic, workaday question implied by the existence of any novel review, rendered into the explicit here to illustrate the ambiguities of the answer. is 'the coup' by john updike a good book? perhaps.

it has aspects of it which are good, certainly. updike is, at not-infrequent intervals, an astute expresser of complex thoughts and engaging is his capacity to understand the rationalisations of others. this is good, because this meek 300 pages attempts to drill down to a lot of things; Afro-nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, communism, marxism, environmentalism, globalisation, Islam. its remit is that maddening panoply of anxieties presented by the post-colonial world, where the old empires have stagnated under the shadow of the newer, the shadowier, the more abstract one too coquettish to self-assess as an 'empire'.

africa, it is certain, takes these knocks the hardest. at its core, the coup is about one man's confusion between his perennial neuroses and his radical traditionalism. ellelou is a dictator who refuses american humanitarian aid while his people starve. he weaponizes Islamic rhetoric while he consorts with careerist women. he's, at-times, a pitiable holdover of a world destined to die, but whose convictions are too wrapped up in his own selfish history, and his responses too casually cruel to sanction.

and there's the rub. when updike dazzles with observations about the geo-political condition bordering on the profound, it's made bitter by its coming through the perspective and the mouth of a strawman. ellelou hates america because he is doggedly obsessed with america. his fundamental insincerity pollutes the moments where updike swings for the fences with the feeling that the reader is being made fun of.

not to mention, as frequently as this book impresses, it succumbs to eye-rolling didacticism. the nadir is a moment where a white professor condescends an african student over the latter's inability to intellectualise the continent's plight. moments like that broker no ambiguity, updike is insulting my intelligence just a little.

so while 'the coup' is probably not a good book (and it is done no favours by comparison to 'season of migration to the north', a novel i read recently with superficially similar themes), it is at least a very interesting one. and if the satire can sometimes get the best of its author, it's a commendable effort all the same.

[Friendly John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Updike, my Updike. For the first half of this book I felt completely lost in time and space. It takes place in Africa and there are desert and camels and Allah. But of course it's when Updike starts in with his memories of white bread wisconsin that we get the good stuff. Everything wrapped up nicely and I got into the second half a lot more. I'd definitely say it was a strong finish just in style and weaving, but no cliffhanger suspense (which is fine) or deus ex machina.

I've found myself apologizing for Updike in his Rabbit series for being a smart liberal (?) harvard grad writing about the common man with all the faults of common men from the era (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, - onward if you read licks of love). So I apologized for his overt racism. For some reason I have more trouble doing it in this book and now maybe retroactively as well. I just don't think you can keep writing this stuff down only because you heard it somewhere. There comes a certain point that you have to believe some of it, even a splinter of it, to keep writing it down. The two absolute stingers of lines in this one was when explaining the white wisconsin girl Candy being drawn to the studying african, our protagonist Ellellou, and he went into some biological attraction of white women in general to, get this, "the tar baby" - When I read that I was just like wtf. The other one a woman's bare leg is described as the color of healthy shit. White people are actually the color of chicken meat, but for some reason explaining tints and applying them to skin just never fits right. Shit? The color of shit, healthy or not, shit? I don't know, I was like wtf. But he's not around anymore to answer me. (Thanks Wendell Berry for writing back.)

[Harry Ramble · Rating 3 out of 5]

Few people come to Updike for stern, idealistic, Marxist African revolutionaries, but that's what we have here. This book comes courtesy of Updike's mid-70s African tour, his subsequent divorce from his first wife Mary, and a hella lot of mid-century travel guidebooks and National Geographics. It's an outlier in his bibliography, to say the least.

Updike appears to believe that Africans speak in a lofty, grandiose style, full of rich allusion and metaphor and poetic observations. Or he may just be pulling our leg. Nowadays, he'd be pilloried for it (as he kinda was, for 2006's Terrorist, which I've never read). There's a lot of broad comedy here, of the culture-clash/Americans v developing world sort, and some magical realism too, a conceit he would attempt with better results in The Witches of Eastwick.

My copy of this was a 1978 Fawcett Crest mass paperback, something I've owned for 40 years. Its acid-damaged pages fell out of the ruined binding one by one as I read it.

[Tom Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finished this novel. I didn't think I would but I persevered until the end. Some parts of the novel are much better than others.

One remarkable thing was show so very similar the isolationist nativist rhetoric of the Islamist Marxist protagonist is to the isolationist nativist rhetoric of Fox News opinion hosts. They have the common characteristic that they are fearful of anything or anyone that is different from them. and their reaction is anger and suspicion. Only they follow the one true path.

Reading most parts of this novel was a grim as watching an evening of suspicion, ignorance and anger on Fox News. Perhaps that was Updike's intention. he succeeded if it was but it did not make for an enjoyable or enlightening read.

[Mark Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Updike maintained his position as one of America's foremost men of letters right up to his death, and here he has given us a wonderful black comedy set in a fictional country in Africa that is ripe for political upheaval. He uses the chaos of Kush, the country he has created, to display the constant worldwide presence of The Ugly American. The country's iron-fisted ruler, Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou, hates America and Americans, yet finds that he has his hands full of the red, white and blue.
Updike gives us a serious comedic adventure, the likes of which we came to know in classics like Bech: A Book and A Month Of Sundays. His wit never wavers...this is the same Updike who gave us Rabbit Angstrom and the Maples'.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

1978’s satirical The Coup was a big departure for John Updike, with his previous novels all based in Pennsylvania or Massachusetts, giving “the mundane its beautiful due.” Because of that I’ve always avoided this one, but it turns out I really enjoyed it (maybe thanks to my lower expectations?). The African Islamic dictator Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, AKA Happy, sounds a lot like he grew up in small-town PA, was educated at Harvard and Oxford, and wrote for The New Yorker, but Updike gets extra credit for deftly bouncing between first- and third-person and between the fictional nation of Kush (1973) and the equally fictional college town of Franchise, Wisconsin (1958).

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Set in a fictional Sahelian African country (which basically is very similar to Chad), and gives the story of a dictator who overthrows a monarchy. I found it impossible to get into the book; even though I normally like Updike's books, i'm not clear on what insight he has into either Islam, Africa or anything more specific. And the use of a fictional country seems like a convenient excuse to overcome that lack of knowledge, since the author can make the country sound vaguely African-y while not having to be accurate about anything.

[Glenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have lived in a former French colony in Africa, so much of this book is reminiscent of those days and times. Updike does a good job of describing the varieties of African experience between the Sahel and the Sahara. He explores the problems of the African struggle to absorb the influences of Europe, the United States, and the totalitarian powers.

The main character, Hakim Felix Ellellou is well-developed and intriguing. Most of the other characters are rather thinly drawn, and mostly serve as props in Ellellou's personal drama.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite Updike, but, alas, my last. I've now read every novel. Maybe only 3 1/2 stars for this but, still, those Updikean sentences, like this: “The serene heavens, as witnessed by astronomers, shine by grace of explosion and consumption on a scale unthinkable, and the glazed surface of marble or the demure velvet of a maiden’s eyelid are by the dissections of particle physics a frenzy of whirling and a titanic tension of incompatible charges.”