Jihad on the turnpike.(Terrorist)(Book review)

Terrorist, by John Updike (Knopf, 320 pp., $24.95)

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TO praise John Updike ought to require what the lawyers call standing. You should be in a position to bestow it--that is, your good words should be worth a damn. Praising the obviously accomplished not only courts presumption, inviting the riposte of Dr. Johnson, "Consider with yourself what your flattery is worth, before you bestow it so freely"; it's also a great bore. Still, one is tempted to dive into the cyber-vaults of LEXIS/NEXIS and pour out the borrowed, syrupy encomia as thickly as possible and claim the sentiments as one's own. But sometimes they are one's own.

John Updike, to put a fine point on it, has been the chronicler of the American promise for half a century, perhaps the most consequential writer of fiction in our time. Among all contemporary authors, he is most the journeyman, writing to and for the moment, but without the pedestrian attitude; he looks above, below, and beyond the surfaces. Within the pages of well over 50 books in as many years, ranging from fiction to poetry to literary and art criticism, this consummate craftsman has, with daring and elan, held up a mirror to both America's ideals and its illusions. Although he has described a peculiar radiance vibrating in the American soul--with a sense of immense, latent potential and idealistic faith in a Better Tomorrow--some of what he has shown us about ourselves has not been flattering. But then we wouldn't expect an artist to flatter. However much he has turned over the rocks of our character to reveal what lies teeming and writhing beneath, his confidence in an essential goodness and vibrancy about America and its people doesn't seem to flag.

"The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter," Updike has said, "are the old apartments of religion," and he has signed a long lease on them. He takes religion seriously and always has. No matter what he's explored in the way of social manners and mores, not to mention what happens behind the shutters, man's quest for transcendence, for a higher meaning beyond the passing scene--ultimately for God--has always played the same role in his fiction as a basso ostinato does in music, a haunting line rumbling along below the tripping, twittering themes quivering in the air above, yet holding everything together; it's always there, often more felt than heard, or, to switch senses, less the light seen than the light seen by. Now he enters those old apartments of religion again, but this time through a very different door.

Nobody has ever accused the au courant Updike of a disinclination to be topical, but with his new novel, Terrorist, he's taken topicality to a dark, all too current place. This book is a bold literary effort to come to terms with the post-9/11 world, which has been for America a deadly face-off with the Other: a force for utter, all-out barbarity, comprehensible to Western minds only with the most taxing exertions. Yet as this force has been thrust upon our time, it's as ripe for artistic handling as any other struggle engaging the human heart, and Updike has drawn a sympathetic, if not sympathizing, picture of one slice of radical Islamic life as seen through the eyes of a New Jersey teenager.

The story revolves around Ahmad Mulloy, an 18-year-old son of an Egyptian immigrant father, who skipped out on the boy before he got to know him, and an American mother of Irish extraction, a nurse's aide who has raised her son as best she could by herself in New Prospect, a rusting city rife with economic discontent. Ahmad, presumably seeking a connection to his absent father--he longs to adopt his father's surname when he finishes school--finds a makeshift mosque in a shabby neighborhood and converts to Islam at the age of 11. He then slowly begins building a new enlightened self under the intense gaze of a shadowy imam, Shaikh Rashid, who instructs him in the Koran several times a week after school, admonishing him to keep to the straight road, not the ...