"The Coup" is a comedy of racial and cultural incongruities; but whereas Waugh and Theroux use a white protagonist … to clear a path for us into the Dark Continent, Updike has the fictional audacity to project a black among blacks, a militant and culturally, though not sexually, puritanical Marxist-Muslim, the redoubtable Col. Hakim Félix Ellelloû, as the commanding figure and voice of his novel. (p. 1)

[Ellelloû] is an extraordinary tour-de-force of a character, an ideologue who reminds me of one of Nabokov's mad narrators, a Humbert Humbert or a Charles Kinbote; like them he is obsessed, self-destructive, nimble and often endearing…. The African wives, too, are distinctively fleshed-out and memorable, as are the old King and Ellelloû's elegant and treacherous associate, Michaelis Ezana. Oddly, the American characters are the least successful; in their case, Updike has contented himself with satirically outlined pinups.

Updike loves to show...