THE BOOK AGAINST AMERICA:

Jihad and the Novel: UPDIKE TAKES ON TERRORISM: a review of Terrorist By John Updike (James Wood, 06.25.06, New Republic)

Terrorist portrays an eighteen-year-old American Muslim named Ahmad, who, as the novel begins, is about to graduate from his New Jersey high school. Ahmad "is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by extraction, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the hot muddy fields of the overflowing Nile." (Ah, those Egyptians. This lofty genealogy is an extraordinary example of airy Orientalism, which, because the sentence combines baking and mud, clumsily manages to imply that the ancestors were somehow baked in mud. Egyptian bog people! Does Updike reread his own prose?) Ahmad has been violently influenced by his imam at the local storefront mosque, one Shaikh Rashid. As we encounter him at the start of the book, Ahmad is already boiling over with anti-American thoughts; we are thus offered no idea of what he was like before meeting the imam, what he was like as, say, a moderately Islamic fifteen-year-old.
What is most striking about this novel is that, despite Updike's massive familiarity with the technical challenges of fiction-writing--this is his twenty-second novel, for goodness sake--he proves himself relatively inept at the essential task of free indirect style, of trying to find an authorial voice for his Muslim schoolboy. He will begin a paragraph in his character's voice, and then, apparently losing any capacity for the necessary ventriloquism, decide utterly to write over his character. Here is Ahmad surveying the desolate downtown of the book's invented city, New Prospect, New Jersey:

To Ahmad's eyes, the bulbous letters of the graffiti, their bloated boasts of gang affiliation, assert an importance to which the perpetrators have pathetically little other claim. Sinking into the morass of Godlessness, lost young men proclaim, by means of defacement, an identity. Some few new boxes of aluminum and blue glass have been erected amid the ruins, sops from the lords of Western capitalism--branches of banks headquartered in California or North Carolina, and outposts of the Zionist-dominated federal government, attempting with welfare enrollment and army recruitment to prevent the impoverished from rioting and looting.

This standard-issue anti-Semitism is obviously not Updike's own thought, but an attempt at Ahmad's. Then why not make it sound like Ahmad's? But then, what does Ahmad sound like? Presumably to set him apart from his infidel coevals at school--principally, a nose-studded sluttish African American called Joryleen and her thick-set boyfriend Tylenol--Updike gives Ahmad a formal diction, a "pained stateliness" that is redolent, I suppose, of many hours of Koranic study and deep, intolerant cogitation. The effect is that whenever Ahmad opens his mouth he sounds like a septuagenarian Indian aristocrat. In fact, he sounds a bit like V.S. Naipaul--and late Naipaul at that. When Joryleen invites him to her church, Ahmad attends. Afterward, he thanks her: "You have been gracious to me, and I was curious. It is helpful, up to a point, to know the enemy." Up to a point, eh? He walks Joryleen from the church to her house: "I wish to see you home." And the long perorations are worse. Here Ahmad tells a colleague about his mother:

He tells Charlie, to be honest, "I think recently my mother has suffered one of her romantic sorrows, for the other night she produced a flurry of interest in me, as if remembering that I was still there. But this mood of hers will pass. We have never communicated much. My father's absence stood between us, and then my faith, which I adopted before entering my teen years. She is a warm-natured woman, and were I a hospital patient I would gladly entrust myself to her care, but I think she has as little talent for motherhood as a cat. Cats let the kittens suckle for a time and then treat them as enemies. I am not yet quite grown enough to be my mother's enemy, but I am mature enough to be an object of indifference."

One can understand, then, why Updike, in third-person narration, writes over his character so absolutely: he is icing a hollow cake. Ahmad has no personality, no quiddity as an eighteen-year-old American, so he is Updike's serf, ready for whatever the writer chooses to do with him. In Updikeland, this means lyrical authorial commentary. [...]

Updike has spoken of his desire to treat Islam "sympathetically" in his new novel; and he has been praised, if a little wanly, for differing from "other novelists looking over their shoulders at 9/11." Unlike them, says John Leonard in New York, "Updike isn't writing from the victim's point of view." There is no reason to doubt Updike's intention. If sympathy brings understanding, let us have sympathy. But who would desire Updike's kind of sympathy? Wanting to dignify his hero, Updike drastically overcompensates and turns his schoolboy into a stiff stereotype--he's a bigot, Updike seems to be saying, but rather a stately bigot, for all that. How can it be sympathetic to a religion to present, as its exemplar, such a solemn robot?

Again, one is struck by the peculiar clumsiness on Updike's part. He surely knows that what makes Conrad's anarchists poignant and Dostoevsky's revolutionaries profound are the contradictions of their resentments. They long for a place in the society that they plan to destroy, and their destruction is related to their longing. Underground impotence, for Dostoevsky, is a hatred almost indistinguishable from love: this is his great insight, which is still helpful for anyone trying to analyze modern religious and ideological alienation. For a contemporary novelist, the way to animate these contradictions would be to evoke an American Muslim who sounded just like his secular friends, who indeed had secular friends (unlike the anchoritic Ahmad), who shared their taste in music and films, or was at least tempted by their music and films. Such a character would then be interesting in proportion to his resistance to a pressure--the great pressurizing blandishments of American postmodernity. All this should be obvious to a novelist on his second, let alone his twenty-second, novel. Equally, such a writer would surely know that the way to close down such authenticity, to freeze the novel in the colorless gas of the inauthentic, would be to make the Islamic young man an absurdly one-dimensional, furious solitary who has already rejected as an "infidel" everyone from the president to his mother.

Until the last pages of the book, when Ahmad must decide whether or not to bomb the Lincoln Tunnel, this young man is never seen engaging in any kind of internal struggle at all. So he has no real relation to American society. He seems attracted to Joryleen, but we are not told of any previous attraction, even furtive, to anyone else. Ahmad seems to have moved through his teens in hormonal quarantine. (How remarkable, for instance, that Updike, of all novelists, never courts the possibility of Ahmad masturbating.) Updike has done his research, and he has inky fingers to show for it: the Koran is quoted, sometimes in phonetically rendered Arabic. But again, because we first meet Ahmad after his conversion to radical Islam, we have no sense of how the Koran lived inside him before the great awakening. Edifying suras are solemnly quoted, but as a kind of religious logo, as blocks of dogma only. Moments of skepticism, of doubt, are promptly quashed as infidel ideas.

Perhaps this is indeed what the mind of a radical Muslim terrorist looks like, but it makes for a peculiar inversion of the very notion of fiction: Updike's "sympathy" has resulted in a figure who would not be out of place in a work of Islamic propaganda.

Isn't the point that it is just a piece of terrorist propaganda and that the terrorust is hollow because Updike doesn't actually feel any sympathy with him or his cause, but is merely trying to be PC?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 1, 2006 11:15 AM