The Good Terrorist has been labelled a " political novel " by the publishers and some reviewers , including Alison Lurie in The New York Review of Books . Lurie stated that as political fiction , it is " one of the best novels ... about the terrorist mentality " since Joseph Conrad 's The Secret Agent ( 1907 ) , although this was questioned by William H. Pritchard in The Hudson Review , who wrote that compared to Conrad , The Good Terrorist is " shapeless " . Several commentators have pointed out that it is more a novel about politics than political fiction . In From the Margins of Empire : Christina Stead , Doris Lessing , Nadine Gordimer , Louise Yelin called the work a novel about politics , rather than a political novel per se .