As a writer, John Updike has always come off better in the venue of the short story. When it comes to novels, he has only occasionally traveled outside the realm of the aging, male WASP.
And even then, the success of such ventures (“The Centaur,” “The Coup,” “The Witches of Eastwick”) can be counted on one hand. Yes, Updike’s “Rabbit” series is brilliant, but a reader can only take so much suburban bedroom/upper middle class white man angst.
Fortunately, Updike, in the seventh decade of his life, has managed to write “Terrorist,” a novel about an 18-year-old, mixed-race Muslim whose devotion to his religion and his god causes him to agree to commit an act of terror.
For those already wondering, Updike easily pulls it off.
“Terrorist” is a deeply moving, thought-provoking and powerful work of literary suspense that should be on everyone’s must-read list.
Born of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who long-ago abandoned his wife and child, Ahmad is steeped in a fundamentalist Muslim belief that has him moving through his high school, his New Jersey neighborhood and his life with utter disdain for all things American.
Ahmad’s home town of New Prospect – “those who occupy the inner-city now are brown, by and large” – a place where new buildings are erected in the city’s ruins as “outposts of the Zionist government,” and where welfare and army recruitment are “sops” to prevent rioting, is perfectly described in this passage by Updike: “East Main Street in the blocks around Tilden is a carnival of idleness, thronged by an onrolling mass of dark citizens in gaudy clothes, a Mardi Gras parade of costumes lovingly assembled by those whose lawful domain extends scarcely an inch beyond their skins, whose paltry assets are all on view.”
Wielding that powerful voice of description, Updike tells the deceptively simple story of a disenfranchised youth who is easily influenced by others and eventually becomes a tool of politics (social and economic) and religion.
Under the tutelage of Shaikh Rahsid, who runs a mosque (and, in his student’s eyes, grown weakened by Western culture), Ahmad has become a religious fanatic. In Ahmad’s eyes, everyone – and everything – in America’s Western-dominated culture is insidious.
There is Joryleen Grant, a chubby, big-breasted trashy girl who both repels and attracts him, setting up a conflict between Ahmad and Joryleen’s boyfriend, “Tylenol” Jones, who roams the hallways of their school like a self-imposed king.
And there is the aged Jewish guidance counselor, Jack Levy, who tries to no avail to help Ahmad. Although a supporting character, Jack’s story is a compelling one. He is married to Beth, a woman whose obesity has gotten out of control. Falling in love with a nurse’s aide, Jack sees his life as a constant string of failures. He is the quintessential 1960s former radical, now grown disillusioned.
As Jack points out to Ahmad, “Once you run out of steam, America doesn’t give you much. It doesn’t even let you die, what with the hospitals sucking all the money they can out of Medicare. The drug companies have turned doctors into crooks.” Despite his best intentions, Jack, in turn, becomes a tool to be manipulated by Ahmad.
Some may find “Terrorist” a difficult read, and not only because Updike’s rich prose refuses to take as many paragraph breaks as the pages of most thrillers do. With Updike fully inhabiting the mind of Ahmad, who looks upon everything and everyone with a cool, calculating and sometimes cruel eye, the novel’s narrative carries that tone along even in passages that don’t feature the young boy. But the tone and tenor work perfectly, supporting the dire mood of the story, lending an air of inevitability that will keep readers on edge until the very last line.
Though we now know that most of the perpetrators of the 9/11 horrors were not products of urban blight and decay, or poverty – as is Ahmad – it’s also true that many zealots are born of such conditions in other countries. “Terrorist” shows us how young minds with little or no parental guidance and exposure to supernatural beliefs can easily be manipulated. Updike’s novel examines how a variety of influences, including the indifference of society, can play a role in creating a person so damaged, so insecure, so desperate to matter in a world seemingly dead set on destroying him that he will blithely take innocent lives.
“Terrorist” is the sort of powerhouse novel that will surely gain Updike the notice of award committees, so don’t be surprised to find his latest raking in handsful of them by this time next year.
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelance writer from Missouri.
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TERRORIST
By John Updike
Knopf, 310 pages, $25
