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Acclaimed on a regular basis for being among the best fiction writers of his time, at age 74 John Updike brings forth a protagonist starkly unlike his adolescent young males in many of his 21 earlier novels. Ahmad, the son of an Egyptian graduate student and an Irish American mother who dabbles in art, experiences many of the awkward yearnings and self doubts of any other 18-year-old American. Yet there is one grave exception: he is a devout Muslim under the tutelage of a radical imam who runs an obscure mosque in a converted dance studio above a shop in New Prospect, New Jersey.
Updike successfully brings to life the fundamentalist Muslim view of American glut and excess in such a chilling fashion that we cannot fail to catch a glimpse of why our way of life is an impenetrable mystery that appears evil to the purists of ancient Middle Eastern thought. Ahmad views Americans with jaundiced scorn and contempt. Women are temptresses to be feared and yet adored. Aspirations to acquiring conspicuous belongings are spurned as evil. Only through the glory of serving Allah can he fulfill his life's purpose.
As Ahmad approaches graduation, he is seen as an underachiever by his high school guidance counselor, Jack Levy, who belatedly recognizes a spark that should have been kindled much earlier. Levy tries to dissuade Ahmad from going to truck driver school and instead enter a city college, but the imam has other plans for the impressionable and sensitive youth. Ahmad is inexorably and unknowingly pulled into becoming the primary player in a sinister plot to be carried out on the anniversary of 9/11.
The novel is not without its traditional sexual nuances. We see deep within the frustrated guidance counselor, Jack Levy, as he struggles with a mature but unhappy marriage by reaching out to Ahmad through his mother. Ahmad is tempted by a wild young female fellow student into giving up his purity, and the agonies of a moral dilemma are treated with pure Updike angst.
Updike treats the American government's oblivious disregard to knowledge of the Muslim culture with frustration. We are introduced to passages, written in Arabic and then translated, showing the flowery, metaphorical and obscure writing endemic to the Arabic language. FBI investigators listening to phone chatter, but unschooled in the poetic linguistics used even when suspects are speaking English, miss the significance of references to blinding light and rushing waters as a direct clue to the growing plot. Even Ahmad is sometimes puzzled by the murky descriptions, especially of paradise. He questions his imam about the logic of how dark-eyed virgins can still be virgins if so many heroes reach paradise in their pursuit. This leads to an eye-opening alternative translation of the Koran in that respect, yet it is so skillfully explained away by the cleric that Ahmad is convinced that any misinterpretations are inconsequential and that sitting at the right hand of Allah surpasses all.
TERRORIST is a breakaway genre for Updike, who has never before written a thriller, and yet thriller it is. We are drawn, page by page, knowing a terrible act is about to take place even though Ahmad in his innocence only belatedly discovers his role in the unfolding drama.
--- Reviewed by Roz Shea
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