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The Coup By John Updike Knopf, 299 pp., $8.95 Updike’s portrait of a mythical anti-Western African leader and his “Islamic-Marxist” state, Kush, converges with a cascade of anti-American events—in Jonestown, Iran, Afghanistan, and the White House—to take on an air of prophecy.

Consider this event in The Coup: an American official named Gibbs waits for two weeks to hand over a huge shipment of food sent as a humanitarian gesture to the starving population of Kush, where the drought has gone on for five years. Colonel Ellelloŭ, the furious President of Kush, whose air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz is loaded up with food out of sight of the crowd, tells Gibbs: “Are you aware . . . that climatic conditions in this region have been the same for five years, that the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ you speak of is to us the human condition?” As Gibbs begs the President to accept the food, Ellelloŭ signals the crowd to apply torches to it.

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David Evanier

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The Coup By John Updike Knopf, 299 pp., $8.95 Updike’s portrait of a mythical anti-Western African leader and his “Islamic-Marxist” state, Kush, converges with a cascade of anti-American events—in Jonestown, Iran, Afghanistan, and the White House—to take on an air of prophecy.

Consider this event in The Coup: an American official named Gibbs waits for two weeks to hand over a huge shipment of food sent as a humanitarian gesture to the starving population of Kush, where the drought has gone on for five years. Colonel Ellelloŭ, the furious President of Kush, whose air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz is loaded up with food out of sight of the crowd, tells Gibbs: “Are you aware . . . that climatic conditions in this region have been the same for five years, that the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ you speak of is to us the human condition?” As Gibbs begs the President to accept the food, Ellelloŭ signals the crowd to apply torches to it.