Posted on Sun, Jun. 18, 2006

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Truth be told

In his brilliant new novel, John Updike moves beyond pop-culture stereotypes to a meditation on the mysteries and terrors of alienation and faith.

BY GLENN C. ALTSCHULER

Knight Ridder News Service

Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the terrorist in John Updike's dazzling new novel, fits the profile. When Ahmad was 3, his father, an Egyptian exchange student, abandoned the family. Ahmad's mother, a "blithely faithless" Irish-American, is a nurse's aide who paints and designs jewelry, a permissive parent who thinks her son's life "isn't something to be controlled."

As he "tasted American plenty by licking its underside" in the racially mixed working-class neighborhood of New Prospect, N.J., Ahmad, a bright and lonely kid, grew hungry for something more. At age 11, he became a Muslim. Soon, he was "wrapped in the sensation of God standing beside him — so close as to make a single, unique holy identity, closer to him than his neck vein, as the Quran expresses it."

At the behest of his imam, Shaikh Rashid — and against the advice of his guidance counselor, Jack Levy — Ahmad drops the college prep curriculum, with its corrupting courses in Western philosophy, literature and history. After graduating from Central High School, he gets a commercial driver's license, authorized to carry hazardous materials. "After a life of barely belonging," Updike writes, "he is on the shaky verge of a radiant centrality."

With Ahmad on that "shaky verge," Updike then designs his terrorist as pridefully, petulantly and painfully human, an exploding bundle of contradictions.

Though he sees himself as "God's sole custodian," though his "insides are clenched shut, filled with the All-Encompassing," Ahmad remains sentient, sexual, selfish and aware that human beings "seek attachments, however unfortunate." He believes holy bliss comes to those who confront the enemies of Islam, that only the doer owns the deed, but he knows he has no warrior skills and that Shaikh Rashid is using him.

After he is recruited, Updike writes, beautifully and brilliantly, self-sacrifice "has become a part of him, a live, helpless thing like his heart, his stomach, his pancreas gnawing away with its chemicals and enzymes." So he grieves not for himself, but for his truck, with "its cheerful pumpkin orange, its ornate script lettering, the vantage from his driver's seat that puts the world of obstacles and dangers, of pedestrians and other vehicles, just on the other side of the tall windshield."

Ahmad's America is full of "obstacles and dangers." "Devils are busy in it," Ahmad thinks, "confusing things and making the straight crooked."

Apparently, Updike agrees that American culture provides "too many paths, too much selling of useless things," that freedom without purpose "becomes a kind of prison." It's a familiar critique, redeemed principally by the perfect-pitch prose through which it is delivered.

Without a structure of Divine Law, a code of self-sacrifice or exalted submission, America offers "a clashing diversity of private self-seeking," whose catchphrases — "Dog eat dog" and "God helps those who help themselves" — carry two meanings, "self-reliance and grab what you can."

"Terrorist" is not without flaws. The plot turns on clunky contrivances and coincidences. Jack Levy has a pipeline straight into the office of the secretary of homeland security. And, on the fateful day, the traffic patterns and stoplights operate in perfect conformity to the laws of the Hollywood chase scene.

Nor does the dialogue ring true. Although only the narrator uses the phrase "pharyngeal fricative," the discourse and diction of Updike's characters are often, well, Updikean. The mosque gives Muslims "what the Christian U.S. disdains to," 18-year-old Ahmad proclaims — "It asks austerity. It asks restraint."

These imperfections don't matter much. "Terrorist" burrows beneath the surfaces of American popular culture, which Updike traverses so well, to truths worth remembering. The "luster of Paradise" looms before terrorists and, Updike observes, can even "leak backward" into a reconstructed past.

But, thank God, like all of us, terrorists must live in the present. Banal, benign and brutal, it offers more than enough to make life precious, with or without the certainty of salvation.