Michiko Kakutaniコミュの(51)TERRORIST

June 6, 2006
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
John Updike's 'Terrorist' Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

TERRORIST
By John Updike
310 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

John Updike writing about terrorism? The bard of the middle-class mundane, the chronicler of suburban adultery and angst, tackling Islamic radicalism and the call to jihad?
In theory Mr. Updike's shopworn new novel, "Terrorist," not only gives him an opportunity to address a thoroughly topical subject but also represents an effort to stretch his imagination ・ to try to boldly go where he has never gone before, as he did with considerable 駘an in his African novel, "The Coup" (1978), and with decidedly less happy results in "Brazil," his misbegotten 1994 variation of the Tristan and Iseult legend.
At the same time, it offers Mr. Updike a chance to explore some of his perennial themes from a different angle: to look at the sexually permissive mores that his other characters have embraced through the disapproving eyes of an ascetic, religious man, and to contemplate this man's absolute and unwavering faith, which is so unlike the existential doubts and tentative yearnings for salvation evinced by Mr. Updike's earlier creations.
Unfortunately, the would-be terrorist in this novel turns out to be a completely unbelievable individual: more robot than human being and such a clich・that the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found the idea of such a person so incomprehensible that he at some point abandoned any earnest attempt to depict his inner life and settled instead for giving us a static, one-dimensional stereotype.
"Terrorist" possesses none of the metaphysical depth of classic novelistic musings on revolutionaries like "The Secret Agent," "The Possessed" or "The Princess Casamassima," and none of the staccato, sociological brilliance of more recent fictional forays into this territory, like Don DeLillo's "Mao II."
For that matter, the journalistic portraits of the 9/11 hijackers that Terry McDermott of The Los Angeles Times pieced together ・from interviews with acquaintances of the hijackers, "The 9/11 Commission Report" and material from interrogations of captured terrorists ・in his 2005 book "Perfect Soldiers" are a hundred times more fascinating, more nuanced and more psychologically intriguing than the cartoonish stick figure named Ahmad whom Mr. Updike has created in these pages.
Ahmad, we quickly learn, is the only child of an Irish-American nurse's aide and her Egyptian husband, who decamped a few years after his son's birth. Ahmad is now a senior at a public high school in a fading industrial town in New Jersey; he plays soccer in the fall and runs track in the spring. Despite his decent grades, he has recently switched from the college track to the vocational one: after graduation, he plans to become a truck driver ・at the behest of his mentor, the imam at the local mosque, where Ahmad has been studying the Koran. His high school guidance counselor, Jack Levy, finds this career choice more than a little perplexing.
At 18, Ahmad is a virgin and expresses a deep disgust with sex. He rails against the decadence and dissipation he sees around him: the skimpily dressed girls at school, his mother's blowzy attire, the lewd and lascivious words he hears on the radio and the television. He declares that he seeks "to walk the Straight Path" ・something that is not easy to do, he thinks, in a country where "there are too many paths, too much selling of many useless things." He is given to saying things like "the American way is the way of infidels," and the country "is headed for a terrible doom." Or: "Purity is its own end." Or: "I thirst for Paradise."
In other words, Ahmad talks not like a teenager who was born and grew up in New Jersey but like an Islamic terrorist in a bad action-adventure movie, or someone who has been brainwashed and programmed to spout jihadist clich駸. Much of the time he sounds like someone who has learned English as a second language.
Mr. Updike does an equally lousy job of showing us why Ahmad is willing to die and kill for jihad. We're told that the imam who teaches Ahmad the Koran has become a surrogate father to the fatherless boy. We're told that Ahmad is disgusted with his flirtatious mother and her succession of boyfriends. And we're told that he wants a mission in life and can't think of anything else he wants to do after high school.
None of these factors explain why Ahmad blindly follows the imam's directives and seems to have no will of his own. None of them explain why he has reached 18 without making a single close friend or seriously dating a single girl. And none of them explain why this supposedly gentle soul, who goes out of his way not to step on an innocent bug, gives no thought at all to the hundreds ・perhaps thousands ・of people he would kill were his suicide mission to succeed.
Ahmad's relationship with his mother is defined solely by his contempt for her casual sexual mores. Mr. Updike gives us no sense of their day-to-day relationship or the emotional history they have shared for nearly two decades, the sort of thing he has done so effortlessly with characters in earlier novels. Nor does he show why Ahmad's mother, self-absorbed as she may be, hasn't wondered about her son's growing religious fervor or his desire to learn how to drive large trucks filled with hazardous materials, particularly when all this is happening in the wake of 9/11.
Though Mr. Updike manages to extract a fair amount of suspense from Ahmad's story, he does so with the heavy reliance on unbelievable coincidence. Ahmad's mother will begin an affair with his high school guidance counselor, who happens to be married to a woman whose sister works for the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who is worried about a terrorist plot being hatched in the very New Jersey town where Ahmad happens to live. Needless to say, the ensuing developments in this maladroit novel prove to be every bit as dubious as Ahmad is as a recognizable human being.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/books/06kaku.html?_r=1&oref=slogin