Terrorist: A Novel

Vintage Updike, in the Present Tense

And what would you expect from a John Updike novel with the title Terrorist? Maybe a sentence like this one, somewhere in the first paragraph: "All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair." Well, of course. You almost feel sorry for the preening, studious, zealot-in-training Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy; he can try to despise his sexed-up classmates all he wants, but his authorial creator has set him up. This is the Updike you know, and the world is New Jersey in present-tense and unflinchingly observed. The details are fleshy, profane, lovingly prosaic. Ahmad, the product of an absent Egyptian father and flaky Irish-American mother, is devout and "speaks with a pained stateliness." He listens to his imam when he tells him to get a commercial driver's license (uh-oh, you think); he is in thrall to the beauty of Islam. The weak encouragements of his college advisor Jack Levy, a depressive atheist with a crush on Ahmad's mother, are too little, too late, and Ahmad finds himself at the center of a plot that involves a truck rigged with explosives and the Lincoln Tunnel. But there is still the flesh.

If you were looking for evidence of Updike's fustiness, you would need look no further than the naming of the school bully, Tylenol Jones, whose girlfriend becomes the object of Ahmad's desire. But this is a rare tone-deaf slip; Terrorist is a wonderfully sharp work. Part extreme coming-of-age story, part thriller, it is carefully plotted, articulate, and fortified with good writing. But it also has an old-fashioned willingness to make the great problems of the day personal, human-scale, and funny, and it is for this reason that Terrorist is a book to admire and be entertained by at once.

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