Terrorist [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: Shaikh Rashid, Jack Levy, New Prospect (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 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.
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From The Washington Post

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
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (June 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307264653
• ISBN-13: 978-0307264657
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (151 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #363,309 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A qualified "thumbs up", July 10, 2006

By	B. McEwan "yellokat" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This is a tough call, but on the whole I am giving this novel 4 stars because it successfully held my attention, got me engaged in trying to understand the characters' motives and is beautifully written. Having said that, I want to acknowledge that many of the criticisms leveled here by other Amazon reviewers do have merit, primarily the charge that Updike's characters are often stereotypical. Of interest to me is that, while many reviewers complained about the stereotypes of fat wives, Arab-Americans and single mothers, I didn't notice any comments on the characters of African-American school girl Joryleen and her boyfriend, who is named "Tylenol," of all things. But in any case, since the stereotype issues have been well covered by other reviewers, I'm going to let that go and focus on what I see as the positives of this novel, and there really are quite a few.

For one thing, I like the fact that Updike chose this very difficult topic to write about and also made obvious efforts to understand aspects of Islamic-American culture that are doubtless utterly foreign to him. An author of his standing could just coast for the rest of his career, but this writer chose to stretch himself and try to get inside the mind of a character that represents a far more complex America than that of Rabbit, for example. This is an America that we had all better take a shot at understanding, since this is the one we are living in today, and will have to go on living in for some time to come. Believers in Islam are here and they are becoming an ever more important force in the polyglot US -- AND it is pretty clear that many of these folks are severely disaffected from the mainstream culture. *If* this alienation tends to encourage violent actions, then those of us who are of the so-called "majority" culture had better spend some time trying to understand why that is, and think about how we can help these new US residents succeed here. (That's a big IF, since it seems perfectly plausible to me that cultural alienation does not lead to "homegrown" terrorism at all. But for the purposes of this review, I am assuming that it could.)

Another positive of this novel is that it is beautifully written and highly evocative of place. The place happens to be a depressingly urbanized New Jersey, so it's easy to miss the power of Updike's descriptions, but consider this passage: "...the sky cloudless but for a puffy far scatter over Long Island, the ozone at the zenith so intense it seems a smooth-walled pit of blue fire, the accumulated towers of lower Manhattan a single gleaming mass, speedboats purring and sailboats tilting in the bay, the cries and conversation of the tourist crowd making a dapple of harmless sound around them. 'This beauty,' Ahmad thinks 'must mean something -- a hint from Allah, a foreshadow of Paradise.'

As for the criticism that Updike is anti-American and using the character of Ahmad to voice his own complaints, I counter by saying that it's important for us Americans to be more self-reflective than we may find comfortable, and that Updike is contributing something useful by raising important moral and ethical challenges to our behavior as a nation in the world. Take for example this line from pp. 198-9 of the novel: "[True adherents] believe that a billion followers of Islam need not have their eyes and ears and souls corrupted by the poisonous entertainments of Hollywood and a ruthless economic imperialism whose Christian-Jewish God is a decrepit idol, a mere mask concealing the despair of atheists."

Granted, that is powerful stuff and certainly discomfiting. But if one reads any of the world's press at all, it is pretty clear that this is the image that many people have of America, and the challenge Updike's characters are presenting in this novel seem to me to be worth considering. What sort of response shall we give to a comment like the above? How observant of our religious principles are the majority of us here in the US, and what about the economic fallout of our national trade and security policies? I am not saying that I agree with the assessments of the characters in this novel, nor do I necessarily think we should assume Updike does. But it is a view that we might at least consider if we hope to come to peaceable terms with the billions of Muslims who are solid citizens of this and the world's other nations, and who have no hostile intentions.

So, for me, the bottom line on Terrorist is that it's an important book that raises difficult questions that ought to be given some serious thought. We should be glad that Updike chose to write it.

55 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but doesn't quite live up to its promise, July 4, 2006

By	Galen K. Valentine "gallaine" (Fort Worth, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Updike's, "Terrorist" is a timely novel. Newspapers and magazines are still full of the ebb and flow of terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. It is difficult for me, and by extension I think of American society in general, to understand why anyone would choose to become a suicide-bomber. Though they are only a fraction of the terrorists they are the most puzzling. So, I bought Updike's latest book on the strength of his reputation as a novelist and the reviews claiming his understanding of the radical mindset.

On the surface the story is about a teenager, Ahmed, who embraces an austere form of Islam. His mother, perhaps feeling guilty about his father's departure, leaves him to his own devices. An intervention is clearly necessary to save Ahmed from his Imam and Updike chooses Mr. Levy, a sixtyish guidance counselor at Ahmed's high school. The story's trajectory predictably puts Ahmed and Mr. Levy together in the truck carrying the bomb.

Scratch the surface though and you find...well, read on.

Ahmed is largely unforgiving, except, illogically, to the father who abandoned him. He is unapologetic, never needing to justify his beliefs to others or even to himself. His isolation and social awkwardness are not the product of his own attitudes, but of everyone else's. In almost every way, Ahmed acts like any teenager, if a bit more radical. And that is the problem. Remove the radical Islamic element from the novel and you have a story of a generic teenager. If Updike is saying that suicide-bombers are just like "ordinary" people, with the same problems and fears, I think he missed the boat. There clearly is a difference. If there weren't, then suicide-bombers would be far more prevalent. What I had hoped for was a deeper understanding of why an Islamist would choose to commit suicide in a manner that kills as many other people as possible. Failing that, I would have liked to understand why Ahmed as an individual would make such a choice; his social problems aren't enough since so many other children of broken families face the same issues without making such a gruesome decision. I got neither.

The story is structured to propel Ahmed, and by extension the reader, toward his violent final act - exit stage left. But we are robbed of even that. Surprise endings aren't bad. I like them. But only when they result in that, "Aha!" moment when all of the pieces fall together. This wasn't one of them. I felt blind-sided and left wondering just what the point of the book was.

It might seem that I hated the book. I didn't. There were moments when I felt that Updike had looked into the soul of America and understood it. The scenes devoted to Mr. Levy and his wife are masterful. I just felt that he hadn't delivered on the promise of the book.

Updike was, and still is, considered one of the premiere voices of American society. But, "Terrorist" showed me that he hasn't quite mastered the subtleties of another culture. In the final analysis, I'm not sure Updike understands suicide-bombers anymore than I do. He does put a more human face on them. And his writing is superb. In that respect, "Terrorist" is worth reading. But don't expect to gain a deeper insight into terrorism.

44 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars guess I'm in the minority here, June 15, 2006

By	E. M. Bristol "bibliophile" (boston, mass) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

but I was a bit baffled by this book. For one thing, the writing was so uneven. There were beautiful, evocative descriptions of the New Jersey suburb, and then there was sexual metaphor that reminded me all too well why I avoid cheesy romance novels like the plague.

I know this sounds incredibly presumptuous, but it seemed to me like Updike made a mistake a lot of first time novelists make by not trusting his reader enough. I think anyone who picks up a book like this can be expected to remember which character is obese, which is Jewish, which wears black jeans and white shirts, and which has gorgeous green eyes without it having to be hammered home throughout the book. Quite a few writers out there do seem rather enamored with the color of their protagonists' skin and eyes and so forth, but I for one would prefer more time to be devoted to developing their thoughts, feelings, personalities and motives. Especially motives. If a basically non-violent young man who is not a complete sheep is going to decide to carry out a suicide mission, it needs to be clearer what's going on inside his head. Updike gives us various motives, but none seems strong enough for him to decide to take such a militant course of action.

As reviewers have mentioned the titular "terrorist" winds up being the most likeable character in the book, but he gets this by default. The other characters are inoffensive at best and repugnant at worst. True a character can be deeply flawed and likeable at the same time, but that did not really apply to any of the ones in this book. In fact, I consistently got the feeling that it wasn't really the protagonist who looked down on the Americans around him, it was Updike.