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Updike’s
Terrorist: An(other) American Folly Page 64 John
Updike’s latest novel attempts to get inside the mind of a would-be
suicide bomber. He paints a portrait of a young American Muslim lured
by radical Islam, impatient for God. It fails. Shackled by an absurd
plot, Raneem Azzam finds that
while Terrorist has moments of sensitivity, it lacks humanity and
genuine insight to be convincing. Terrorist is the story of two characters striving to make meaning out of their lives and deaths within a “preposterous popular culture of eternal music and beer.” The central figure is Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an isolated, self-conscious, 18-year-old moving through his final weeks of high school into a new job as a trucker. Ahmad has been a convert to Islam since the age of 11 and in that time has developed a fear of American culture and the “devils” within it who seek to take away his God. Ahmad is a serious and staunch believer and senses that he shares an intimate, proprietary union with the Almighty. He sees himself as “God’s sole custodian,” and although he is aware of his blasphemous compassion for the Creator, he yearns to meet Him nonetheless. If Updike’s rendering of the relationship between Ahmad and his notion of God seems unorthodox, it perhaps reflects the boy’s mixed heritage. As the son of an absent Egyptian father and a liberal Irish-American mother, Ahmad is discovering Islam with little guidance, apart from the tutelage of his bitter and shifty Shaykh, Rashid. The author falls short in his portrait of a young fanatic for more reasons than Ahmad’s confused theology. The boy’s personality, riddled by inconsistencies, rarely feels authentic. He is a born American whose speech pattern is so stilted he sounds as though he is half-foreigner and half-robot. “My mother is too self-absorbed to save me much curiosity,” he says to his friend. “She is relieved I have steady employment and contribute now to our expenses.” Ahmad strives for modesty and yet is proud and vain, loving his newly spurted six-foot body, and adorning it always with freshly laundered crisp, white shirts. He is moralistic and sensitive, yet he faithfully admires his young boss, Charlie, a womanizing Lebanese-American who hires him a prostitute because “until your first piece of ass, you really haven’t lived.” In the final moments of the book, Ahmad’s deference to authority compels him to open his truck door to his high school guidance counsellor while on a suicide bombing mission. This act, absurd on its own, feels most incongruous in light of his disrespect for his mother, the only familial authority in his life, whom he calls “trashy and immoral.” Even Ahmad’s motivation for involving himself in terrorist activity is too muddled to be convincing. Like many extremists, his thoughts are filled with judgment and self-righteousness. He considers non-Muslims the lustful, impure fodder of the Hellfire but his views never quite amount to a sweeping hate. He is willing to attend a church service when invited by an attractive female classmate. He expresses sympathy for the 9/11 victims, saying “how terrible to be so trapped by crushing heat that jumping to certain death is better.” Among the most blatant shortcomings in Ahmad’s extremist rationale is his ignorance of typical jihadist ideology. He occasionally criticizes Israel, and once mentions the writings of Sayyid Qutb, but for the most part he is apolitical. Eventually he chooses martyrdom in order to be “radiant and central” when he’s never fit in. Readers are expected to believe that he is drawn toward death and murder only for the lustre of paradise and the dream of joining his lonely God. The bugs in Ahmad’s portrayal are all the more glaring in contrast with the success of Jack Levy, a guidance counsellor at Ahmad’s school. Although Jack forces his way artificially into the plot, he is a deeply credible and delicately written character. A 63-year-old non-observant Jew married to an overweight soap-opera junkie, Jack is reaching out for life as he confronts mortality. He is by no means saintly, but his struggles are human and real. Jack is perturbed by the world, changing around him, where houses have turned to tight, crumbling housing projects, where children have to accept the responsibilities that adults refuse to take, and where society is drowning in its own hedonism. He can’t sleep most nights because of the dread he suffers, induced by “an awareness, deepening each day, that all that is left on Earth for his body to do is ready itself for death.” He is a caring man, moved to tears each year at his school’s commencement ceremony and he feels desperate not to become “a humourless enforcer of a system that no longer believes in itself.” At the same time, Jack possesses the capacity for profound selfishness as he reveals through his adulterous affair with Ahmad’s mother. Like the greatest of Updike’s characters, Jack’s Levy’s contradictions mingle honestly together and resonate with truth. Where the novel’s protagonists are intricately defined, the minor characters are disturbingly stereotyped. Jack’s wife Beth is a blithering obese librarian, apparently ignorant of her husband’s indiscretions. Ahmad’s African American tormentor, Tylenol (so named because his mother saw a commercial and liked the way it sounded), is “a robot of meat, a body too full of its juices and reflexes to have a brain.” Tylenol’s girlfriend, Joryleen, begins as a responsible choir girl and Ahmad’s only friend, but turns out to be a “stand-by-her-man” prostitute, willing to be shamelessly peddled to bolster her boyfriend’s fragile self-esteem. The plot of the novel is even more defective than its characters. By the end it plays out like a suspense thriller in which peripheral characters jump in to twist the action through a series of ludicrous coincidences. The connections are so contrived they are laughable. Through his affair with Ahmad’s mother, Jack Levy becomes mildly suspicious of Ahmad’s activities. He mentions his concerns to his wife, Beth, who passes them along to her sister, by chance the assistant to the Secretary for Homeland Security. For some reason, Beth’s sister decides to share classified information with her brother-in-law, leading to his ridiculously fortuitous involvement in the novel’s climactic scene. The strongest element of the book is its setting – a beautifully described decaying mill town called New Prospect, New Jersey. It is a fictional suburb of cracked concrete, abandoned warehouses, and lakes of rubble – the perfect backdrop for the anti-consumerist scorn of Terrorist’s characters. Having once flourished with wealth and opportunity, it now finds itself dried out and empty. It parallels the lives of its inhabitants who Jack and Ahmad believe gorge themselves on decadence to deny their looming deaths. As Updike understands, faltering suburbs are where America is most at odds with itself. They speak to the cultural myths of assimilation and opportunity. Suburbs are unlike America’s hopeful urban centres so cosmopolitan that even the intolerant are tolerated, neutralizing their resistance. They are not the simple rural enclaves where differences rarely meet. Suburbs are America’s indefinable middle ground where hatreds touch and burn or sit simmering within eyeshot. And maybe that’s the problem with Terrorist. It alludes to some complexities of modern culture and some causes of religious extremism and yet it never pulls them into the story. The novel almost suggests that Ahmad disapproves of America because the Quran tells him to and that’s reason enough to be a terrorist. Hatred is not a theory learned from a holy book. The kind of rage that leads people to commit violence against one another is a complex brew of chemicals mixing inside human beings burnt by real life. To be plausible, a book about terrorism must deal with the identity of psychic desperation, the loss of dignity, the politics of marginalisation, and the struggle for power and manhood. America holds a myth about itself - it believes itself to be a restaurant offering an enormous range of options; something for everyone except the maniac who happens not to like its perfect cuisine. The truth is those who wage “jihad” against America don’t hate the cuisine, the American way of life. They hate the lie. They hate the patronizing notion that the U.S. sits innocently waiting to serve them everything they desire if they’ll just step inside. Ahmad is portrayed as a customer annoyed because it’s the wrong kind of food, but the novel proves that that is an absurd reason to agree to blow up the restaurant. Novels have no duty to be realistic but they do need to be credible. Updike’s novel fails because it doesn’t grasp the tangled web of issues that lead to alienation, anger, and militancy in the minds of those willing to kill for their cause. Instead it comes off as the projection of a middle-class White man’s own fears, concerns, and criticisms. In the literary subgenre of work known as “Post-9/11 Fiction” writers must explore deeply complex questions to shed light on a rapidly changing, unstable planet. Fortunately there are emerging writers, many with roots in the developing world, producing authentic stories which explore marginalization, religion, and identity. They are the voices who should have written Terrorist. |