‘Terrorist’ slightly flawed but painfully human

“Terrorist”

by John Updike (Knopf, 320 pages, $25)

Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the terrorist in John Updike’s dazzling new novel of the same name, fits the profile.

When Ahmad was 3, his father, an Egyptian exchange student, abandoned the family. Ahmad’s mother, a “blithely faithless” Irish-American, is a nurse’s aide who paints and designs jewelry, a permissive parent who thinks her son’s life “isn’t something to be controlled.”

As he “tasted American plenty by licking its underside” in the racially mixed working-class neighborhood of New Prospect, N.J., Ahmad, a bright and lonely kid, grew hungry for something more.

At age 11, he became a Muslim. Soon he was “wrapped in the sensation of God standing beside him – so close as to make a single, unique holy identity, closer to him than his neck vein, as the Quran expresses it.”

At the behest of his imam – and against the advice of his guidance counselor – Ahmad drops the college prep curriculum, with its corrupting courses in Western philosophy, literature and history. After graduating from Central High School, he gets a commercial driver’s license, authorized to carry hazardous materials.

“After a life of barely belonging,” Updike writes, “he is on the shaky verge of a radiant centrality.”

With Ahmad on that “shaky verge,” Updike moves beyond stereotypes of the fatherless and brotherless to a meditation on the mysteries and terrors of alienation and faith.

His terrorist is pridefully, petulantly and painfully human, an exploding bundle of contradictions.

Though he sees himself as “God’s sole custodian,” though his “insides are clenched shut, filled with the All-Encompassing,” Ahmad remains sexual, selfish and aware that human beings “seek attachments, however unfortunate.”

He believes that holy bliss comes to those who confront the enemies of Islam, that only the doer owns the deed. But he also knows that he has no warrior skills and that his imam, Shaikh Rashid, is using him.

Ahmad’s America is full of “obstacles and dangers.” “Devils are busy in it,” he thinks, “confusing things and making the straight crooked.”

Apparently, Updike agrees that American culture provides “too many paths, too much selling of useless things,” that freedom without purpose “becomes a kind of prison.” It’s a familiar critique, redeemed principally by the perfect-pitch prose through which it is delivered.

“Terrorist” is not without flaws. The plot turns on clunky contrivances and coincidences. The dialogue sometimes doesn’t ring true. And, on the fateful day, the traffic patterns and stoplights operate in perfect conformity to the laws of the Hollywood chase scene.

But these imperfections don’t matter all that much. “Terrorist” burrows beneath the surfaces of American popular culture, which Updike traverses so well, to truths worth remembering. The “luster of Paradise” looms before terrorists and, Updike observes, can even “leak backward” into a reconstructed past.

But, thank God, like all of us, terrorists must live in the present. Banal and brutal, it offers more than enough to make life precious, with or without the certainty of salvation.

“All around them,” Updike concludes, “up Eighth Avenue to Broadway, the great city crawls with people, some smartly dressed, many of them shabby, a few beautiful but most not, all reduced by the towering structures around them, but scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, their reason for living another day, each impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That and only that.”