Cliches at 22

John Updike tries to get into the mind of a terrorist, and fails

TERRORIST, JOHN UPDIKE8217;S new novel, is set in a declining factory town in New Jersey ironically named New Prospect. Eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ash-mawy Mulloy, friendless, lonely, is the son of an Irish-American woman and an Egyptian exchange student who met on the State Uni-versity campus. Three years after Ahmad was born, his father vanished; at the age of 11, the boy discovered religion at a local mosque. His mother, who works as a nurse8217;s aide and a part-time painter, can barely spend an hour with him every day.

When he discovers that Ahmad is plan-ning to be a truck driver, his high-school guidance counselor Jack Levy, himself a tired and depressed man, tries to persuade him to go to college instead. When Levy comes to meet Teresa, Ahmad8217;s mother, to tell her that her son should apply for college, he uses the diversity argument: 8220;Any college these days, the way the politics of it are, wants diversity, and your boy, what with his self-elected reli-gious affiliation, and, pardon me for saying it, his ethnic mix, is a kind of minority8217;s minor-ity8212; they8217;ll snap him up.8221;

So, how predictable is the story? Ahmad, the misguided young boy with a mother who finds his faith beautiful but can8217;t give him the attention he needs. The boy who falls under the influence of a fanatical Imam and sets off on a suicidal terrorist mission. The only per-son who can change Ahmad8217;s life, an aging high school guidance counselor who still gets all choked up at high school com-mencement speeches.

Updike8217;s 22nd novel is not set in the white middle-class suburbia that he has been writ- ing about for years. This hopeless little town and the mind of the young terrorist growing up here are terrains so unfamiliar to the nov-elist that he resorts to the most simplistic kind of storytelling. Although numerous quotes from the Quran are scattered within the pages of the novel, we are never given a glimpse of the inner motivations that have made Ahmad what he is. He remains a lifeless caricature who speaks in tediously stilted sentences. 8220;The American way is the way of infidels.8221; 8220;Western culture is Godless.8221; 8220;Pu-rity is its own end.8221; When Joryleen, a friendly black girl at school, invites him to hear her sing in the church choir, he is shocked: 8220;I am not of your faith,8221; he tells her solemnly. The problem is not only with the con-trived plot; the prose, too, is tired and unex-citing.

Oddly, the only characters who seem to come alive within these pages, in whose interactions there is a brief spark of life, are Teresa and Jack. That redemptive spark be-tween people8212;their passions, weaknesses and betrayals, the several little complexities that make them human8212;is something that Updike has written about so gloriously in earlier novels. It is a spark that is rarely felt in the pages of Terrorist.