The description of America as “this godless democracy” comes from John Updike's short story, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” first published in The Atlantic in November 2002. One of the first works of fiction by an established American writer to attempt a representation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the story takes the form of a series of brief episodes, each providing different perspectives on 9/11. It features, for example, a section focusing on an office worker trapped in one of the World Trade Center towers, one describing the crisis of faith experienced by another man who watches from a rooftop in Brooklyn as the towers collapse, and one depicting an elderly woman caught up in the hijacking and passenger mutiny on board United Airlines Flight 93.

Multicultural Encounters

Most interestingly, Updike devotes a long section of the story to an account of a meeting between Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian engineer believed to have been the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, one of the young Saudi men involved in the plot. This meeting takes place in a Florida strip club a week before the attacks. Typical of Updike's work, his account of the meeting makes extensive and highly instructive use of free indirect discourse in which the characters’ sentiments – in this case those of Mohamed Atta – are blended with those of a more conventional third-person narrator. The strip club is described as “a dim, unholy place” whose staff and patrons are redolent of “soured American opportunities” and which serves food that resembles “garbage not fit for a street dog.”