Updike Provides a Face for Terror

By Rawlins McKinney October 5, 2006 Issue

In a career approaching 50 years, John Updike has published 21 novels, seven poetry collections, 15 short story collections, eight books of essays and criticism, five children's books, a play and a memoir. While the erudite Updike’s essays and criticism demand a good dictionary be close at hand, the storyteller Updike’s fiction immediately and easily seduces the reader.

His characters have lived, loved and wreaked havoc in such diverse places as Brazil, Africa, middle-class Pennsylvania, and upper crust New England. They have been athletes, preachers, witches, drug addicts, businessmen and neurotic husbands and wives. His most recent short stories in The New Yorker Magazine have brought him back to the Pennsylvania of Rabbit Angstrom and Updike himself.

It's almost like he's telling the same story over and over again. But just when you think you have this brilliant author figured out, he takes off in another direction. In his latest novel, Terrorist, Updike eschews the WASPs in green lawn suburbia for a young Muslim, the son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father, who lives in an ugly factory town just across the Hudson River from New York City. New Prospect, New Jersey is not Brewer, Pennsylvania, and Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy is not an Angstrom. My first reaction was to wonder what in the world a 74-year-old white Protestant man was doing trying to get into the mind of an 18-year-old Muslim boy? Updike is treading on very dangerous ground here. Does he get away with it? I think so.

First of all let's get one thing straight. Updike is not sympathetic with this radical terrorist wannabe, a dedicated suicide bomber who is hell-bent on killing as many people as possible. The old clichÈ that “I don't agree with what he did, but I understand why he did it,” certainly applies in Ahmad's case. But isn’t empathy itself dangerous in certain situations? When we identify with a character about to do a heinous act are we flirting with the evil that may be within our own being? In the climate of fear engendered by the current administration and its supporters, empathy for a terrorist may be just as bad as sympathy. Could one of America’s premiere authors be a candidate for extraordinary rendition, a reprehensible practice in which people are kidnapped by the U.S. government and sent off to countries that specialize in the evil arts of torture? Just kidding. But the love-it-or-leave it flag-decal crowd probably won’t be able to get past the title. That’s their loss. While Terrorist is a gripping tale, it is at the same time a primer on the basic beliefs of Islam. It’s a painless way to learn some of the roots of Muslim attitudes. A good read, but not an inspiration to join al-Qaeda.

Ahmad, a senior at Central high school, has nothing but contempt for his fellow students; the girls with the bare bellies and the strutting and sauntering boys with their “edgy killer gestures.” In his eyes the teachers are even worse. They are "weak Christians and nonobservant Jews,” who make a “show of teaching virtue and righteous self-restraint.” After school, they scuttle off like “pale crabs or dark ones restored to their shells, and they are men and women like any others, full of lust and fear and infatuation with things that can be bought.”

Nothing can deter Ahmad from keeping on the Straight Path. Not Joryleen Grant, a sexy black classmate, who is relentless in attempts to seduce him. Jack Levy, his guidance counselor, is unsuccessful at persuading Ahmad to go on to college after he graduates. Instead, Ahmad wants to get his commercial driver license. His mother realizes it is useless to try to undermine Ahmad's faith. Indeed, to “someone who dropped out of the Catholic package when she was 16, his faith seems rather beautiful.” Seven years earlier Ahmad began studying the Koran with eight other children. Today he is the sole remaining pupil of the imam Shaikh Rashid. He faithfully attends the hour and a half sessions two days a week.

In desperation, Levy makes a call on Ahmad's mother, Teresa, to see what the two of them can do to get Ahmad on the college path. Levy is unhappily married and Teresa is a flaky single mom. Since this is an Updike novel, what happens next is certainly no surprise. There is a lot of sack time that ends unhappily for Levy when Teresa realizes there is no future for the two of them. The problem of Ahmad remains unsolved. The parts of the novel that are told from the points of view of Levy and Teresa take the reader back to familiar Updike territory. It’s almost a relief to be in the minds of these underachievers for a while. But the real story is Ahmad’s. That’s what keeps the pages turning.

Updike skillfully lays the groundwork for the plot that soon begins to take shape when Ahmad graduates from high school. He begins his new job delivering furniture for a store owned by some recently emigrated Lebanese brothers. The business appears legitimate at first but it soon becomes apparent that things are not what they seem.

A thriller novel with literary merit is rare. So are writers as skilled as John Updike.

Alfred A. Knopf, 310 Pages available at local booksellers and libraries.

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