Terrorist

TERRORIST (2006) is the first Updike novel I have read in several years, and it was his last. (He died in January 2009.) It is a book quite unlike his previous novels in that it could easily be classified a "suspense-thriller," not a label I would ever have assigned to an Updike novel before. But here it is, an absolute page-turner, with the usual Updike eloquence and meticulous attention to the smallest of details. Updike also seems to have abandoned his usual Pennsylvania and New England settings and stepped over into Philip Roth country, setting his story in northern New Jersey and creating a memorable protagonist/anti-hero in sixty-ish high school counselor Jack Levy, a disillusioned secular Jew. But make no mistake, the result is show more still pure Updike, particularly in its depictions of sexual situations.

Ahmad, the product of an Irish-American mother and an absent Egyptian father, is a youthful protagonist you will not soon forget. His self-chosen and atypical 'uniform' of starched white shirt and black jeans is perhaps representative of his black-and-white view of right and wrong and the glaring disparity between his islamic "straight path" and the godless ways of the infidels that surround him. Fatherless, brotherless, and all but motherless, Ahmad has been instructed in the Koran from the age of eleven by a shady imam in a shabby store-front mosque. Ripe for the picking, he is recruited as a soldier in the jihad. And here's the thing: Updike has constructed a precise narrative that seeks to explain and understand exactly how a jihadist - a terrorist - is born. And he succeeds admirably, because Ahmad is certainly not a monster. He is a flesh-and-blood young man who simply wants to do what is right and good. As opposed to all the evil, greed, and vice he sees all around him. He is coached by his closest mentor, Charlie Chehab, in how the "jihad and the [American] Revolution waged the same kind of war ... the desperate and vicious war of the underdog ..." and "One revolution led to another ... Revolution never stops."

Updike peppers his narrative with quotes from the Koran, in its original Arabic, with English explanations, as supplied by Ahmad's imam and as Ahmad himself interprets them. Ahmad learns of the Prophet Mohammed astride a white horse, and Ahmad's own vehicle of vengeance is a white truck carrying a deadly payload.

But enough. Filled with suspense, filled with trademark John Updike craftsmanship. A new and odd combination, but it works perfectly. Be prepared to read late into the night, because TERRORIST will keep you up, turning those pages, wondering ... This may have been Updike's last novel, but it shows him at the peak of his writing powers. I miss him. Very highly recommended. show less

Deciding whether Updike succeeded in portraying a complicated development of a terrorist, or if he merely expressed a cliché and gave it stereotypical life, the weight of my feeling hedges toward the later. My uncertainty arises due to his well developed tone of sarcasm and irony with which he populates the novel, perhaps overpopulates. Though an intriguing representation of hysteria and fear pervasive after 9/11, I wonder if his intention does not become muddled in the disdain he evinces toward his main character, indeed, most of his characters.

While reading about Ahmad and his mixed ethnic upbringing, his rather flighty mother, the high school counselor with decent intentions and a wandering eye, and the rapaciously stereotyped show more mullah, I could not shake Updike's pejorative presentation of them and the events to which they subscribe, collude, and surrender. Perhaps this falls entirely within Updike's plan, to build a distance from the characters, but it provoked a less involved and less interested reading from me. I longed to have some measure of sympathy for Ahmad, despite the stupidity and gullibility of his youth, even a fraction of a desire to slap him upside the head would have been better than the indifference I felt.

The thread of Ahmad's fanaticism and objection to the sybaritic consumerism of his American home and surroundings was also tantalizingly insufficient; Updike had the opportunity to offer scathing reproach through Ahmad, and instead it felt merely like the whining of a spoiled child, an insouciant attempt to proffer justification for Ahmad's later actions. Without this involvement of character I felt like the novel was a hollow platform to criticize attitudes toward terrorist activity, edging precariously near racist propaganda, lacking the strident support of satire, the subtle nudge and wink to let the reader become aware of the hypocritical nature of most terrorist discourse. show less

Starred Review. Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch. Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is 18 and attends Central High School in the New York metro area working class city of New Prospect, N.J. He is the son of an Egyptian exchange student who married a working-class Irish-American girl and then disappeared when Ahmad was three. Ahmad, disgusted by his mother's inability to get it together, is in the thrall of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a storefront mosque and preaches divine retribution for "devils," including the "Zionist dominated federal government." The list of devils is long: it includes show more Joryleen Grant, the wayward African-American girl with a heart of gold; Tylenol Jones, a black tough guy with whom Ahmad obliquely competes for Joryleen's attentions (which Ahmad eventually pays for); Jack Levy, a Central High guidance counselor who at 63 has seen enough failure, including his own, to last him a lifetime (and whose Jewishness plays a part in a manner unthinkable before 9/11); Jack's wife, Beth, as ineffectual and overweight (Updike is merciless on this) as she is oblivious; and Teresa Mulloy, a nurse's aide and Sunday painter as desperate for Jack's attention, when he takes on Ahmad's case, as Jack is for hers. Updike has distilled all their flaws to a caustic, crystalline essence; he dwells on their poor bodies and the debased world in which they move unrelentingly, and with a dispassionate cruelty that verges on shocking. Ahmad's revulsion for American culture doesn't seem to displease Updike one iota. But Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame (that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work-all are here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel. show less

Updike is one of my favorite authors of all time. I have 323 books by, about, or containing a work by him and literally thousands of magazines in which he has appeared. The fact that I have not read anything except magazine appearances by him in a while desperately needs remedying. I will not be away so long again.

No one writing today can fashion and shape language the way John Updike can. To me, he is The Master wordsmith of the last fifty years. His essays, his book reviews, his poetry, his short stories, and his novels spin webs of incredible beauty with deep insights and characters as finely drawn and accurate as any ever written. His prose is so graceful, the reader is carried along to places never visited, to characters never met, show more to situations unimaginable, with the ease of an early morning walk as the eastern sky grows pink and a soft breeze cools the face.

Terrorist is such a story. The reader is taken on a ride in a truck driven by a misguided, manipulated young man, who is determined to wreak vengeance on people he does not know, because he has been convinced the strangers he kills have stolen his God.

Early in the novel, the third-person narrator reveals something about the angry young man. Updike writes:

"Ahmad knows it is a sin to be vain of his appearance: self-love is a form of competition with God, and competition is what He cannot abide. But how can the boy not cherish his ripened manhood, his lengthened limbs, the upright, dense, and wavy crown of his hair, his flawless dun skin, paler than his father’s but not freckled, blotchy pink of his red-haired mother and those peroxided blondes who in white-bread America are considered the acme of beauty?” (18).

In the unlikely event that nothing else happens while reading this novel, it will force any one with a shred of heart or soul to closely examine our culture, what it values, and how we treat each other.

Updike also anoints unlikely characters as heroes in the epic sense -- disillusioned, semi-failed, lost souls searching for some light at the end of the dark tunnels which are their lives. At first, these individuals seem to be mere dressing, a bit of bright ribbon on a dull coat or shirt. But Updike brings them along with the reader, and in the end they all find something, even if it was not what they were seeking.

In the early pages of the novel, I felt a bit frustrated because of many the Arabic words and phrases which were not translated. Only a few could be worked out from the context; however, as I read on, I realized Updike was deliberately wrapping Islam in a shroud to keep it as mysterious as it is in real life. How can we understand the anger, the hatred of the fanatical jihadist who believes in a God that will welcome a martyr with 72 “houris” at the instant of death. They believe this God is as close to them as "the veins in their necks."

I don’t pretend to understand any of this after reading Terrorist, but I could feel the anger, the hatred, and the devout belief in an religion that promises the best of everything after a life that offers the worst of everything. This is the same message which fixed the grip of the Catholic Church on the hapless, ignorant peasants of the Middle Ages. The scary thing is these characters are not ignorant and not hapless. Perhaps that is the greatest danger of all. A perfect novel! Unqualified five stars.

--Jim, 7/27/08 show less

Terrorist is the story of a disaffected 18 year old Arab-American who slowly and inexorably gets caught up in a terror plot. While a fascinating portrait of alienation and a sharp social critique, there are some jarring elements to the novel that brought one out of the story and diminished what was otherwise a very good, suspenseful tale and a timely exploration of disaffection and the search for belonging.

Starred Review. Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch. Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is 18 and attends Central High School in the New York metro area working class city of New Prospect, N.J. He is the son of an Egyptian exchange student who married a working-class Irish-American girl and then disappeared when Ahmad was three. Ahmad, disgusted by his mother's inability to get it together, is in the thrall of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a storefront mosque and preaches divine retribution for "devils," including the "Zionist dominated federal government." The list of devils is long: it includes show more Joryleen Grant, the wayward African-American girl with a heart of gold; Tylenol Jones, a black tough guy with whom Ahmad obliquely competes for Joryleen's attentions (which Ahmad eventually pays for); Jack Levy, a Central High guidance counselor who at 63 has seen enough failure, including his own, to last him a lifetime (and whose Jewishness plays a part in a manner unthinkable before 9/11); Jack's wife, Beth, as ineffectual and overweight (Updike is merciless on this) as she is oblivious; and Teresa Mulloy, a nurse's aide and Sunday painter as desperate for Jack's attention, when he takes on Ahmad's case, as Jack is for hers. Updike has distilled all their flaws to a caustic, crystalline essence; he dwells on their poor bodies and the debased world in which they move unrelentingly, and with a dispassionate cruelty that verges on shocking. Ahmad's revulsion for American culture doesn't seem to displease Updike one iota. But Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame (that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work-all are here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel. show less

From Publishers Weekly

Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch. Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is 18 and attends Central High School in the New York metro area working class city of New Prospect, N.J. He is the son of an Egyptian exchange student who married a working-class Irish-American girl and then disappeared when Ahmad was three. Ahmad, disgusted by his mother's inability to get it together, is in the thrall of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a storefront mosque and preaches divine retribution for "devils," including the "Zionist dominated federal government." The list of devils is long: it show more includes Joryleen Grant, the wayward African-American girl with a heart of gold; Tylenol Jones, a black tough guy with whom Ahmad obliquely competes for Joryleen's attentions (which Ahmad eventually pays for); Jack Levy, a Central High guidance counselor who at 63 has seen enough failure, including his own, to last him a lifetime (and whose Jewishness plays a part in a manner unthinkable before 9/11); Jack's wife, Beth, as ineffectual and overweight (Updike is merciless on this) as she is oblivious; and Teresa Mulloy, a nurse's aide and Sunday painter as desperate for Jack's attention, when he takes on Ahmad's case, as Jack is for hers. Updike has distilled all their flaws to a caustic, crystalline essence; he dwells on their poor bodies and the debased world in which they move unrelentingly, and with a dispassionate cruelty that verges on shocking. Ahmad's revulsion for American culture doesn't seem to displease Updike one iota. But Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame (that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work-all are here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

John Updike's new novel is set in a New Jersey mill town that has fallen on hard times. Once home to energetic, white immigrants from Eastern Europe, this city, New Prospect, has decayed to the point where "those who occupy the inner city now are brown, by and large, in its many shades."
Brown-ness and its discontents are central to the novel, and Updike is acutely aware of the many tints and gradations of this color. The novel's principal character, 18-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, is from the lighter end of the spectrum, the product of a short-lived union between a red-haired Irish-American and "an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the muddy rice and flax fields of the overflowing Nile." Although Ahmad's color is darker than "the freckled, blotchy pink of his red-haired mother," it is paler than his father's, whose skin is "perfectly matte, like a cloth that's been dipped, olive-beige with a pinch of lampblack in it." Ahmad is, in fact, "dun, a low-luster shade lighter than beige."

It would seem that the lack of a lustrous complexion has played no small part in giving Ahmad a sense of miscegenation, putting him at odds with the world around him: He is "embarrassed by the mismatch" of his dun skin with his mother's freckled pinkness, which "seems unnaturally white, like a leper's." Ahmad's own preference "is for darker skins, cocoa and caramel and chocolate," and these tastes are well served by his inner-city high school, which is a confluence of muddy hues.

At school, Ahmad's gaze is drawn most often to one particular redoubt of brown-ness: Joryleen, an African American with a "smooth body, darker than caramel but paler than chocolate." Although his interest is amply reciprocated, Ahmad gives Joryleen no encouragement, having been warned by his mentor in Islam that "women are animals easily led." Besides, Joryleen already has a boyfriend, Tylenol, who is not just a very precise shade of brown -- "the color of walnut furniture-stain while it's still sitting up wet on the wood" -- but is also a football player and a gymnast. Tylenol is contemptuous of Ahmad: "Black Muslims I don't diss, but you not black, you not anything."

Actually, since the age of 11, Ahmad has been a regular at the local mosque. Having abandoned the family when Ahmad was a baby, his father has played no part in this choice. A free-thinking Bohemian and an amateur artist, his mother has let her son choose his own path, and it has led him into the hands of the mosque's imam, Shaikh Rashid, who is descended from "generations of heavily swathed Yemeni warriors." The heavy swathing has spared the shaikh's ancestors a baking of the kind that fell to the lot of Ahmad's forefathers in Egypt: His complexion is "waxy white."

This hue may also account for the cadences of Rashid's English, which are curiously like those of the predatory Cambridge Arabists of another era. Vaguely effeminate in appearance, he tells Ahmad that he is a "beautiful tutee" and frequently coos the words "dear boy." Ahmad's speech has a different but equally curious timbre: Although he is a native-born American and has never left the United States, he speaks as if he had learned English at a madrassa run by the Taliban. "I of course do not hate all Americans," he says. "But the American way is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom."

The accent may explain why Ahmad has no friends, despite being bright, polite and good-looking in his "flawless" dun pelt. His isolation, in any event, is complete, and it is the source of his religious and suicidal impulses. When he thinks of God, "alone in all the starry space," he burns with "this yearning to join God, to alleviate His loneliness." His naive but deeply felt religiosity makes him an easy tool for the cynical Rashid, who steers him in the direction of a terrorist cell plotting to blow up the Holland Tunnel. It falls to a teacher at Central High, Jack Levy, a non-observant Jew, to make a last-minute attempt to pull Ahmad back from the edge.

Updike once wrote, "In the strange egalitarian world of the Novel a man must earn our interest by virtue of his . . . authentic sentiments." Authenticity is, to my mind, a tall order for any novelist -- mere plausibility would be enough. But there is nothing plausible about the characters of this book: Only two of them are half-way believable, and they are Jack Levy and Ahmad's Irish-American mother. It is no accident, perhaps, that neither of them is brown.

Updike has clearly been at some pains to familiarize himself with Islam. Not only has he read the Koran carefully, he has also delved into scholarship on the subject. The novel features many quotations from the Koran, in Arabic, with all the scholarly paraphernalia of diacritical marks, etc. Yet the end result is that Updike is unable to cut his brown characters loose from texts, scriptures and ideologies. As for his belief that elaborate descriptions of skin color are a form of insight, it is not wholly without merit, for it does serve to occasionally enliven the prose.

The flow of Terrorist is constantly punctuated with riffs and diatribes on the state of contemporary America, national security, foreign policy, popular culture, technology and so on. Rashid, Ahmad and even the secretary of homeland security are given their say. But their harangues are always delivered in a slightly satirical key, as if none of it really mattered. When the terrorists' arguments are answered at all, it is usually in a register of sardonic and grudging nationalism, by conjuring up images of a past or future America. No one takes the trouble to defend secular forms of justice or government as aspects of the modern world's shared heritage. More puzzling still, no one makes any claims on behalf of that secular realm of expression that permits the practice of such arts as fiction itself.

With innumerable lives at stake, when Jack Levy finds himself faced with the task of giving Ahmad a reason to live and let live, he says: "Hey, come on, we're all Americans here. That's the idea, didn't they tell you that at Central High? Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans; there are even Arab-Americans." Not a word about humanity, family, friendship, sport, poetry, love, laughter.

It is as if a belief in American multiculturalism is the only good reason a human being could have for staying alive. Why indeed do the billions of non-Americans who walk this Earth refrain from blowing themselves up? I suspect that Updike really cannot see that they have any good reason not to.

Reviewed by Amitav Ghosh show less