BOOK REVIEW: Updike Brilliantly, Ruthlessly Rips Apart His Characters in ‘Terrorist’
by David M. KinchenHuntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – Life is indeed a bleak prospect in the once prosperous mill town of New Prospect, NJ (Passaic, Paterson?) in John Updike’s 22nd novel “Terrorist” (Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95).
This is the terrain of Updike’s “In The Beauty of the Lillies”, as well as Richard Price’s “Clockers” and “Freedomland” and it’s also Tony Soprano’s turf. The Eastern European mill hands have been replaced by older whites, some gentrified commuters to New York City, blacks, Hispanics, Korean merchants and more than a few Muslims.
Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy, the novel’s protagonist, is one of the latter and – thanks to storefront mosque iman Shaikh Rashid -- he’s become a fanatic, ready to sacrifice his life for Islam.
Ahmad – joshingly called “Madman” by Charlie Chehab, the Lebanese-American furniture store co-owner who befriends him – is 18 and is about to graduate from Central High School, a typical inner-city school from which almost all the whites have fled. He’s the product of a marriage between Teresa Mulloy and Omar Ashmawy, an Egyptian exchange student who left the marriage when Ahmad was a young child. Terry Mulloy, 40, is a vivacious Irish-American fallen away Catholic nurse’s aide with a string of boyfriends and a desire to become a serious painter.
Her latest conquest is Central High guidance counselor Jack Levy, 63, a man so filled with Jewish angst and depression as to almost be a stereotype – except that of all the Gentile writers who come to mind, Updike has the most Yiddische Kopf (Jewish head). I don’t think even Updike’s s near contemporary Philip Roth – a Jewish-American native of Newark, NJ – could have created a more complex Jewish-American character than Jack Levy. Updike’s “Bech” series is proof positive to me.
Levy tries to steer the brilliant Ahmad toward one of the local colleges, Bloomfield or Seton Hall or Fairleigh Dickinson, but strangely enough the lanky teen wants to take the test for a commercial driver’s license (CDL).
This alone should be enough to tip off Jack and maybe it does – or maybe not. Ahmad graduates from Central, earns a provisional CDL that allows him to drive in New Jersey and not carry hazardous materials and is soon driving a truck for Charlie and his father at Excellency Furniture Co. One of his deliveries to the Jersey Shore leads Ahmad to believe that the furniture business may be hiding something more sinister.
Typical of Updike – and most novelists, for that matter – his characters receive no mercy from the author. Levy’s Lutheran wife Beth, 61, is grotesquely obese and the author gives us all the details. Once upon a time, almost 40 years ago, Elizabeth Fogel, from the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, was as slender as the girls in the Coke commercials, Updike tells us. She has a 64-year-old “spinster” sister, Hermione, secretary to the Homeland Security Secretary in Washington, a character modeled on Tom Ridge. Updike, a Pennsylvania native himself, shows no mercy to his fellow Keystone Staters.
Less fat but still chubby is Joryleen Grant, Ahmad’s classmate and an African-American girl who’s attracted to the handsome Ahmad. Her boyfriend, Tylenol Jones, is a brutal bully, ready to beat up Ahmad for paying attention to Joryleen, while at the same time acting as her pimp.
Shaikh Rashid, whose skin is a “waxy white shared with generations of heavily swathed Yemeni warriors”, has more than a little homoerotic attraction to his “tutee,” the only one left of a group that started studying when Ahmad was only 11 . Charlie appears to talk the fundamentalist talk, but he seems to enjoy the contradictions of multicultural America and confides in Ahmad that he would like to direct commercials.
“Terrorist” is probably the most accessible of Updike’s recent novels and has a “ripped-from-the-headlines” immediacy about it that has probably contributed to it becoming a best-seller for the 74-year-old Updike.
At the risk of reviving a recent literary feud involving another near contemporary of Updike’s, Tom Wolfe, who has famously called Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving “My Three Stooges,” Updike’s “Terrorist” has many elements that would fit right in a Tom Wolfe novel, including abundant product placements in terms of brand names. Ahmad would be a perfect fit at Wolfe’s fictional multicultural Dupont University, where Charlotte Simmons is still a student. They might even end up dating!
If you’re headed to the beach, this is one Updike novel that you can enjoy and feel superior to those displaying books by more obvious authors of fluffy beach reads. If you’ve never read Updike (could there be any such person?) pick up “Terrorist” and find out what you’ve missed. He’s very accessible and is – along with Roth – our best living prose stylist. You might even end up reading his poetry and criticism (It was his review of Wolfe’s “A Man in Full” that earned him the “stooges” designation).
Publisher’s web site: www.aaknopf.com