Doing the Devil’s work
Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the amazingly curious and apparently perpetual work of John Updike will of course be familiar with his profound observations about what is arguably mankind’s greatest obsession and also its most terrible blight: sex. Oh, yes, and religion. In this regard, his new novel Terrorist is much the same as all the others, except this time the religion happens to be Islam.
Updike’s protagonist is 18-year-old Ahmad Mulloy, son of an Egyptian father and an Irish mother. Ahmad is a devout Muslim, but also a hot-blooded young male who can’t help but notice his schoolmate Joryleen’s breasts, which ‘push up like great blisters in the scoop neck of the indecent top that at its other hem exposes the fat of her belly’. Instead of going on to college, and under the guidance of his imam, Shaikh Rashid, Ahmad decides to become a truck-driver, and is looking forward to driving hazardous substances; he has a particular interest in toxic gases, poisons and anything infectious and radioactive. You can perhaps see the way this is heading, and anyway the book’s title rather gives the game away.
Interviewed recently in the New York Times Updike remarked that he thought he had ‘something to say from the standpoint of a terrorist’ and what he has to say, basically, is this: America has become a grotesque parody of itself, destroyed by its own affluence, bloated by gross over- consumption, hollowed out by its lack of moral and religious certainties and beliefs, and generally on its way to hell in a handcart.
If this is indeed the standpoint of a terrorist, then it also happens to be the standpoint of a lot of other people, including many of the characters in Updike’s other novels, such as, for example, Fritz Kruppenbach, the Lutheran minister in Rabbit, Run who shares all of the young Ahmad’s fervour, though he happens to worship a different God. ‘There is nothing but Christ for us,’ says Kruppenbach. ‘All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.’ ‘The world,’ says Ahmad, ‘is difficult because devils are busy in it, confusing things and making the straight crooked.’ Updike, it has been reported, originally imagined the protagonist of Terrorist as a young Christian seminarian.
A book about a young Christian wrestling with his faith, though, would hardly have made an attention-grabbing novel, and Terrorist is nothing if not urgent and up-to-the-minute. Which is its great weakness; Updike, always keen to keep up to pace, towards the end of the book becomes exhausted by his own inventiveness and by the strains and pressures of the time. Ahmad’s adversary and foil is the middle-aged Jack Levy, a cynical Jewish careers counsellor at Ahmad’s high school, whose wife Beth — unbelievably — happens to have a sister who is the Undersecretary of Homeland Security. The entire novel eventually revolves around Jack’s wife’s sister’s boss happening to say to her:
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 licence to drive a truck because the imam at his mosque had asked him to?
Amidst this rather frantic, desperate plotting one is relieved to come across those many passages which remind one that Updike, like cynical old Jack Levy, is a wise counsellor. He writes of Levy, ‘He sees himself as a pathetic elderly figure on a shore, shouting out to a flotilla of the young as they slide into the fatal morass of the world.’ Heed his words.