It was not with a light heart that full house of nearly 900 people listened to John Updike, wearing a suit and tie and crown of white hair, read from his latest novel, “Terrorist” at The Music Hall on Monday, June 26.

As Updike described it to the audience, the novel is “about America now, as a faithless wasteland running a low fever of despair.”

Though beautifully described—especially the passages where Updike read to us of Ahmad’s tattooed and pierced female classmates and too-loud teachers in his 2,000-person northern New Jersey high school—it’s painful to witness a bright young mind enlisted into terrorism. One unexpectedly poignant passage occurs as the main character, 18-year-old Ahmad, and his mentor Charlie stand in New Jersey, contemplating Manhattan’s missing towers and discussing faith, and Ahmad’s willingness to fight for it. As Charlie talks, Ahmad is distracted by the heightened blueness of the sky, the sun leaning on his neck, and the electricity of the day around them. It’s a scene that recalls exactly the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, prior to 9 a.m. This moment, he thinks, “must mean something, a hint from Allah, a foreshadowing of paradise.”

Charlie pulls him back. “Will you fight for them, then?” Ahmad, the thread of conversation lost, absent-mindedly replies, “yes.”

The reading was followed by a musical interlude with Dreadnaught, playing live on stage, then the 74-year-old Beverly Farms, Mass., resident sat with N.H. Public Radio host Laura Knoy to talk shop.

In the 52 years since Updike began publishing, he’s produced 22 books that have earned him the most prestigious awards in the field.  Though he finds “gaucheries” in his early stories and is surprised by how little he knew, he said he enjoys their innocence and the surprise of finding himself doing things in the writing that he doesn’t know how to do now. “Above a certain threshold, I like it all and respect it as a record of the young man I once was,” he remarked.

His latest novel, he said, only appears to be different because of the subject matter. He spent time researching the lives of Muslims in the United States, trying to figure out how to create a bomb, and reading the Qur’an (for a second time). The work, he said, remains the same—posing a place you have never been then trying to go there. “Fiction is a product of ignorance as much as knowing,” he pointed out. “Any novel is a leap into the dark.”

Still, he compared the final product to handwriting. “No matter how you try to make it different, it comes out the same. There are Updikey elements. I was very relieved when I could cook up an affair between Ahmad’s guidance teacher and mother. This put me in familiar territory,” he joked.

He also reminding the audience that when his unsympathetic Rabbit character first appeared in the 1950s, readers deplored him nearly as much as some deplore his empathetic description of Ahmed.

It’s inspiring to see an artist still striving to excel at the task he set out to do 50 years ago, an unusual achievement for an American author. He’s still engaged in the questions of the day—“morbidly obsessed with suicide bombers,” he noted—and concerned with his responsibilities as a writer.

Updike also discussed his faith, and how that has played a role in his career. “Without any belief system, I feel I would be depressed and lack courage. Being a Christian, even a watery Christian, has given me the courage to take risks.” Courage is not often a term that comes to mind when thinking of novelists. It was moving to consider, and to reflect on what might happen if everyone applied such a standard to themselves.

Writers on a New England Stage series is a unique partnership between The Music Hall and NHPR, in collaboration with RiverRun Bookstore. The producers aim beyond the flavor of the month to choose authors of broad stature—Dan Brown, Alan Alda, Doris Kearns Goodwin among them—and fans have responded by packing the hall. A hundred years from now, it’s fairly likely that whoever’s in charge will mention that these figures once graced the storied stage, and that their names will still mean something.

The only thing lacking was more time with John Updike—at the end of the night, each  person on that room would have been happy to take him out for a cup of coffee and just continue the conversation.

Coming next to Writers on a New England Stage is Mitch Albom, author of “Tuesdays with Morrie” and “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” on Friday, Sept. 29. He’ll be discussing his new novel, “For One More Day,” due to be released in September.