Terrorist by John Updike reviewed by Gerald Sorin

Posted on 10-09-06

Although John Updike is incapable of writing anything without some literary panache or deep philosophical and theological musing, Terrorist, his twenty-second novel, reads in many places like a less-than-thoughtful feature story. It is riddled with deep structural implausabilities and little substance,  and gives us almost no understanding of the motivations of the chief protagonist. I could not help thinking, after finishing Terrorist, which ends not with a bang but a whimper --  that my review should say no more than: “Headline: Jew Stops Muslim from Destroying New York, Catholic Says!” Although there is some excitement in the narrative there is little surprise. It is relatively easy to guess early on  that Ahmad Mulloy, the eighteen-year-old son of an Irish-American nurse’s aide and a long-gone Egyptian foreign exchange student, is learning to drive a truck and studying advanced manuals so that he can get a license to carry explosives and blow up his loaded rig at a weak point in the Lincoln Tunnel.  After several improbable coincidences involving his former guidance counselor Jack Levy  (who is having an affair with Teresa Mulloy, Ahmad’s mother), he doesn’t push the plunger. His truck, with Levy in the passenger seat, emerges from the darkness of the tunnel into the beginnings of a very bright day: “All around them, up Eighth Avenue to Broadway, the great city crawls with people, some smartly dressed, many of them shabby, a few beautiful but most not, all reduced by the towering structures around them to the size of insects, but scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, their reason for living another day, each one of them impaled to live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self preservation. That, and only that. These devils, Ahmad thinks, have taken away my God.”

            This could have been the start of a compelling book; instead it is the very end of a repetitive and ultimately less than believable flirtation -- that, and only that -- with a set of important ethical questions. Where Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Andre Malraux succeeded in illuminating at least some dimensions of the minds and hearts of ideological fanatics (there is more than one kind, but Hitler Youth, Stalinists, the Red Guards, Islamic Jihad, Khmer Rouge, and Shining Path do have a lot in common), Updike has given us a mere sketch (Ahmad is too full of speeches and stilted language and too stripped of material and emotional history to be real) of a lonely, impressionable teenager, growing up in seedy New Prospect, New Jersey, infatuated with Islam and with a series of father figures, including Omar Ashmawy, his own absent dad, Shaikh Rashid, his teacher, and Levy, his former mentor.

It is not too much to have “given away” the ending here, because Updike all along makes Ahmad’s failure to carry out his mission much more credible than the boy’s planning to be a suicide bomber in the first place. After all, it is almost out of nowhere that Ahmad decides to become a disciplined Muslim, and more importantly, a fundamentalist militant, purer than the Koran itself. But he is far too fond of the world to become a martyr. It may be that “the world is difficult,” because, as Ahmad thinks, “devils are busy in it confusing things and making the straight crooked.” But, he says, for example. “people are pretty nice, mostly.” Moreover, he can be moved by the beauty of a blue sky or by sail boats tilting on a sunlit bay. He is attracted to a black teen whose breasts are the color of eggplant, and he can take a moment to estimate how much lower -- “a finger’s breadth” -- girls would have to wear their hip-huggers “to release into view the topmost fringe of their pubic curls.”

Ahmad is really only the latest in a long line of Updike boys (Rabbit was far more interesting) stumbling toward near-manhood, This is where Updike shines, as well as when he gives us --  through Jack and Teresa’s sheet-rumpled and love-flooded scenes --  the colors and aromas of adultery, especially between post-middle-aged men and women (yes, yes, people over sixty still do that), couples seeking solace from (and sometimes contributing to) the grim

decadence and meaningless materialism of post-modem America. Indeed, Jack and Teresa make Terrorist energetic and entertaining, but if you are looking for some insight into the roots and

character of Islamic Jihad against the West or for some handle on what makes a person, in Victor Serge’s words, a “lunatic of one idea,” this book will disappoint.

Go Back to Features.