Updike, John - Terrorist

John Updike is the hardest working writer in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Most widely known for his “Rabbit” Angstrom novels, Updike has forged a five decades-long career - and won every major American literary prize - exploring the art, sex, and religion (“the three great secret things”) of his beloved New England. Updike also writes art criticism for the New York Review of Books and is a regular contributor (of both fiction and non-fiction) to The New Yorker. He has churned out approximately a book a year since 1958. This includes children’s books; collections of poetry, short stories, and essays; a memoir; a play; and 22 novels, debuting with The Poorhouse Fair in 1959. If Updike has utilized a multiplicity of forms, he has also ventured out on occasion to tackle a range of genres and themes. The Coup (1978) is a satirical tale of the fictional African country of Kush and its exiled leader, Colonel Felix Ellellou. Toward the End of Time (1997) is a fantasy novel set in the year 2020 in the aftermath of a Sino-American nuclear war. In the slight Gertrude and Claudius (2000), Updike tells the backstory of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, casting the queen of Denmark in a more favorable, almost “liberated” light, and speculating on the events that culminated with “Good night, sweet prince,/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!.”

Updike is far from familiar WASP-ish territory in his latest novel. Terrorist is set in New Prospect, a decaying city in northern New Jersey. The protagonist is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when Ahmad was very young.

For seven years, Ahmad has studied under a local imam, Shaikh Rashid, who teaches the devout teenager that to love God is to hate the United States and to see all unbelievers as “enemies.” The shaikh’s brand of Islam isolates Ahmad from family and friends. Despite an attraction to Joryleen, a classmate, Ahmad cannot help but imagine “her smooth body, darker than caramel but paler than chocolate, roasting in that vault of flames and being scorched into blisters.” Ahmad all but shuts out of his life his mother, Teresa - a nurse’s aide and avocational painter - because he is offended by her bohemianism, her revealing outfits, and her loser boyfriends.

Into the Mulloys’ life comes Jack Levy, a school counselor, who begins an affair with Teresa and urges Ahmad to escape New Prospect and go to college. But Levy cannot compete with the imam’s dire warnings against the “corrupting influence” and “relativistic approach” of Godless western culture. Neither is Levy able to overcome his own cynicism after seeing a career’s worth of misguided students “float away into the morass of the world”; Levy scribbles on the topmost page of Ahmad’s file “lc” and “nc,” his abbreviations for “lost cause” and “no career.”

In fact, the imam has a career in mind for the boy. There are aspects of truck driving that appeal to Ahmad’s personality. He finds in the transport regulations a “concern with purity” that is “almost religious in quality.” “All across this land, Ahmad now realizes, hazardous materials are hurtling, spilling, burning, eating roadways and truck beds - a chemical deviltry making manifest materialism’s spiritual poison…It excites him, however, to see himself - like the pilot of a 727 or the captain of a supertanker or the tiny brain of a brontosaurus - steering a great vehicle through the maze of dire possibilities to safety.” But a group of violent jihadists have more insidious plans for Ahmad’s training. Shaikh Rashid, who is at the center of the plot, tries to recruit his disciple for a suicide mission:

“It would involve a shahid whose love of God is unqualified, and who impatiently thirsts for the glory of Paradise. Are you such a one, Ahmad?” The question is put almost lazily, while the master leans back and closes his eyes as if against too strong a light. “Be honest, please.”

Ahmad’s rickety feeling, of being supported over a gulf of bottomless space only by a scaffold of slender and tenuous supports, has returned. After a life of barely belonging, he is on the shaky verge of a radiant centrality.

Like its main character, Terrorist is a novel caught between two worlds. The book has been billed as Updike’s foray into contemporary fiction - a thriller, but with words like “extricate” and “maieutic.” The problem is that it doesn’t thrill. Despite a few captivating scenes, such as the one above, most of Terrorist is simply unexciting; it is burdensome almost from the start and for the first 150 pages the book’s title is the only hint of a dramatic payoff up ahead.

Each month, it seems, the US or UK announces it has foiled the deadly plans of a homegrown terrorist. But the relevance of Updike’s novel is overshadowed by its trendiness. He references 9/11, the Iraq war, and Bush administration officials - which are understandable - but also Levitra and Viagra, J.Lo and A-Rod. A story that could have been timely instead comes off as merely dated for freshness.

The author inserts into the novel several long diatribes that are as out of place in John Grisham as they are in, well, John Updike. In a book about a pious Muslim (Ahmad), a lapsed Catholic (Teresa), and a secular Jew (Jack Levy), Updike transcribes, nearly word for word, a seven-page sermon from the local Protestant church. He also includes several pages of thoughts from Jack’s obese wife on soap operas and the difficulties of getting out of her La-Z-Boy chair, as well as a short history of the American Revolution in New Jersey courtesy of Ahmad’s boss, Charlie.

There is the occasional flash of light (it is still Updike), such as: “The orange truck rumbles past small iron signs and overlookable monuments commemorating an insurgency that became a revolution; from Fort Lee to Red Bank, its battles had been fought, leaving thousands of boys asleep beneath the grass.” But Terrorist is mostly dull, driven neither by character nor plot, unrealized both as literature and pulp. It is a disappointing offering from one of America’s most distinguished writers and the reader will be left wanting more. But if John Updike keeps up his fifty-year prolific streak (and one assumes he will), I doubt the reader will have to wait very long.