John Updike
TERRORIST
320pp. Hamish Hamilton. £17.99.
0 241 14351 9
US: Knopf. $24.95.
0 307 26465 3
John Updike is rightly recognized as the foremost chronicler of quiddity, of what he calls the lives and “minds of middling America”. His great talent is the magnification of the minor details that constitute our ordinary existence: he makes the small loom large. His new novel, Terrorist, is a departure, because it shows us what happens when he seeks to address in his fiction something so extra-ordinary, something already so huge in the imagination, as the terrorist threat to America.
Most of the novel is seen from the point of view of a half-Irish, half-Egyptian teenager named Ahmad Ashmawy Molloy, who is disgusted by the Western world around him, “full of lust and fear and infatuation with things that can be bought”. Scornful of his white mother, and yearning for an absent father, he devotes his entire life to a fervent commitment to Islam, and this brings him into contact with extremists who are seeking to cause yet another symbolic explosion in the New York area.
Ahmad’s wholehearted holiness is the keynote of the novel, and Updike is desperately keen to emphasize it, giving his character a preponderance of thoughts like “the world is difficult because devils are busy in it, confusing things and making the straight crooked”, or “they lack true faith; they are not on the Straight Path; they are unclean”. These musings are ornamented by the novelist’s determination to record correctly the external trappings of Ahmad’s religion. With typical diligence, Updike has thoroughly researched the Islamic world; he transcribes whole passages of Koranic quotation and italicized Arabic, which glint formidably in the text like gold stars awarded for hard work: “the eloquent language al-lugha al-fusha”; “Friday’s salat al-Jum‘a, when a sermon is preached from the minbar”; “the white undertrousers called the sirwal, and, level on his tidy head, the white brimless lacy cap, the ‘amama, that identifies him as an imam”, and so on.
In one way, this purposeful attempt at realism is very much to the author’s credit. Updike is seeking to give a detailed account of a dangerously volatile subject that is otherwise liable – especially perhaps in America – to be dismissed without such thoughtful consideration. He is also unafraid to reveal an empathy for a rigorous religious philosophy that is foreign to his own. Ahmad, despite eventually becoming the terrorist of the title, is not dismissed as mad or savage, but rather seen as a young man righteously repelled by the uncivilized world and wrongly manipulated as a result.
Nevertheless, it is still an unnaturally reductive portrait. The relentlessness of Ahmad’s piety is not contextualized by any other characteristics: he is allowed to stand for nothing other than his religion, is no more than a Muslim metonymy. Ahmad’s version of events in Terrorist – in contrast with, say, the secular digressions of the theologian Roger Lambert in Roger’s Version (1986) – is merely a continual statement of his religious beliefs; the multiplicity of other life is never allowed to intrude. So, the young man’s spoken words, like his private thoughts, are conscripted into the service of emphasizing his role as a serious Muslim. This is his conversation with a fellow student:
“Fun”, as you put it, is not the point of a good Muslim’s life. I take lessons twice a week in the language and lessons of the Qur’an. I attend Central High. I am on the soccer team in the fall – indeed, I scored five goals this past season, one a penalty shot – and do track in the spring . . . . I clerk at the Shop-a-Sec from twelve to eighteen hours a week, and this can be “fun”, observing the customers and the varieties of costume and personal craziness that American permissiveness invites.
Updike has apparently forgotten that Ahmad was born in America, with one anglophone parent, and lets him talk like an autodidact immigrant who has picked up the English language by reading technical manuals. He feels no more real a person than his unscrupulous imam, who is reduced to the contrasting status of movie-villain Muslim, a distillation of sibilant malignancy and ostentatious zeal: “I know, the shadows are lengthening, the spring day outside our windows is pathetically dying”; or “it is presumably as clear as crystal in the graven prototype of the Qur’an that exists in Paradise. Ah, Paradise; one can hardly wait”.
It is as if the size and seriousness of the subject matter have compelled Updike to over-simplify his approach, in order to give him room to manoeuvre his characters to the end of the story, when Ahmad joins a conspiracy to blow up a tunnel into New York.
The novel is reduced to something of a political thriller, a plot-based potboiler, with a prescribed narrative conclusion. The storyline is not unrealistic – three people were recently arrested for apparently attempting to destroy the Holland Tunnel in similar fashion – but it is sometimes unrealistically achieved; Updike, unlike Ahmad, is no great plotter.
For example, Ahmad is discovered in his conspiracy solely because the sister of his school counsellor’s wife works for the Secretary of Homeland Security. This accounts for the following tortuous plea from the Secretary’s secretary to the counsellor’s wife, which in turn leads to Ahmad being exposed:
“Do you remember you mentioned this young Arab-American Jack had taken such an interest in, who instead of taking Jack’s advice to go to college had gotten a license to drive a truck because the imam at his mosque had asked him to?”
We remember, at this point, that we do not generally turn to Updike for his stories, but for his storytelling; it is not the incidents that we recall from his writing, but the incidental impressions that are caught in the prose. William Dean Howells once referred to “the novelist’s anxiety to produce an image that is startling and impressive, as well as true”; it is these three adjectives which we would unhesitatingly apply to Updike’s fiction and which are put to the test again in Terrorist.
The most questionable area is the truth of the writing. Ahmad, we are told, “notices fewer mundane details than other people, unreligious people”. Yet, Updike shackles himself to this young man – through his customary free indirect style – and seeks to see the world through the boy’s supposedly uncomprehending eyes. The results are novelistic impressions that cannot possibly be faithful to the character. In one scene, Ahmad examines his imam closely and spots that his pronunciation has “the soft knife-edge, the soulful twist, of the pharyngeal fricative” and that his eyes tremble “as if with a weight of jelly behind them”. He then analyses his mentor’s provocative comments, finding them to be “a teasing-forth, from his student, of necessary shadows and complications” to such an extent that “the rub of maieutic irony feels sharper, and the boy’s stomach chafes, and he wants the lesson to end”. The idea of a maieutic irony so pointed as to cause a stomach-ache is surely the conceit of the Harvard-educated author rather than his callow creation.
Such critical carping – with its concerns about narrative theory rather than practical pleasure – would be misplaced, if Updike were always able to be true to the object being described, if not the character doing the describing. This is, however, where his desire to be startling and impressive can become a problem. Take the offhand reference to “the eastern edge of the lake of rubble, where becalmed parking lots alternate with choppy waves of knocked-down brick”. We notice the fluid metaphor for the rigidly concrete and are brought up by the deliberate disjunction; we pause to consider its purpose, and then ruefully conclude that there is none. The passage feels both writerly and wrong. Another example of synaesthesia for its own sake illustrates the point further:
“Her voice relaxes into a brassy color, with a rasping edge, then rises in sudden freedom to a shriek like that of a child pleading to be let into a locked door.”
The first image is rather brassily artistic, and essentially unimaginable. It is only when the metaphor becomes a recognizable sound (the shrieking of a child) that we get a sense of the singer’s voice: high-pitched, urgent, childishly unrestrained. Updike is showing us something crucial: that when he is most true to the physical world, he is the more startlingly impressive.
A key scene in the novel – as ever with Updike – comes in the bedroom. The old Jewish counsellor Jack Levy is in bed with Ahmad’s mother, the blowsy Irishwoman (one cannot help referring to them as ethnic stereotypes, because that is what the novel does). Immediately, we get the highly sensitized, rapturously material style typical of all Updike’s descriptions of sex; the author singing a hymn to a her:
“When in fucking she sits on his lap, impaling herself on his erection, he feels the colors reflected from her walls flow down her sides along with his hands, her elongated, rib-filled, preening, Irish-white sides.”
Such heightened writing is not just artful preening, a merely metaphorical mangling of senses: the colours of the room do combine with the feel of her flesh; the pulsing of the epithets suggestively mimes the sexual act they are describing. Updike is on familiar ground: “I felt”, he has said in an interview of this part of the book, “I was in a scene I could really handle”. This is literally true: he is surely at his best describing things he can get his hands on, writing – as Nabokov enjoined – to “caress the details, the divine details”. Here is the well-caressed flesh of Mrs Molloy:
“The whole doughy softness of her – white bread without the crust – is exposed, he feels, defiantly, an invitation to kindness that he has failed to accept heartily enough. The sight of her, so naked and female, so sensitive and lumpy, dries his mouth.”
The sight recalls the “dark dough” of Cindy Murkett’s thighs in Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Updike is certainly back, if only for a brief moment, in that rich vein of description that is able to account both for the concrete and the abstract – the lumpy and the sensitive – aspects of physical interaction.
However, Mrs Molloy turns to Jack with a typical Updike request: “Tell me about my cunt, Jack. I want to hear it”. Updike now has the opportunity – taken for almost the entirety of his last novel, Villages (2005) – to linger lovingly on a familiar area, which has always allowed him to show his ability to capture the carnal. But Jack struggles and stammers like a teenager: “it’s perfect, it’s gorgeous, it . . . is wet and fuzzy and soft as a flower inside and stretchy”. He has to stop, defeated by an odd inability to find the right words.
This is a renunciation on the author’s part, a declaration that he has now decided to depart from his previous métier of physicality, of caressed detail and detailed caresses. Updike is closing his bedroom eyes, those acute novelistic receptors: the next time we meet the couple, they have already “made love” and, like a pair in a Hollywood movie, are quick to “bring the sheets up over their naked bodies”. It re-inforces the fact that Updike has given us instead a novel with other priorities: a strong narrative climax, a political dimension, and an attempt to be daring enough to empathize with the alien situation of Islamic extremism.
The problem is that Terrorist is most successful when Updike gives us sentences that could be taken from any of his earlier novels. These precisely capture the “sensual sparks”, to quote Nabokov once more, of everyday existence, the quotidian made quotable: the “whale of a woman giving off too much heat through her blubber”; eyes that “shine as if reflecting a treasure she has spotted within him”, or “pale green, like the glass bottles Coke used to come in” (an image, indeed, directly lifted from 1968’s Couples). When Updike forgets about the purpose of the narrative, and the looming presence of the Islamic issue, he shows us that he can still – and, sadly, perhaps can only – magnify the minutiae of life to a magnificent extent. This is Ahmad, no longer a representative of his religion, but just a child of middling America:
“Just he and the television in the living room – the electronic box so frantic and bumptious with the hiccups and pops and crashes and excited high-pitched voices of cartoon adventure, and its audience, the watching child, utterly quiet and still, the sound turned down to let his mother sleep off her date last night.”
