Fiction: Updike's "Terrorist" Plot has Character

Perhaps John Updike's critics would like the master novelist NOT to try to understand how a teenaged Muslim is manipulated into becoming a suicide bomber?

[Aside: In a response on another's blog (edrant.com), I wrote this succinct statement:
Yes, “Updike dared to be sincere about his underlying humanism.” Ahmad is only more intense than the others in the book, but they’re all wrestling one way or another with how our American world makes it tough to believe in God or anything. Even that isn’t a slam on America, just an observation of the way it’s turned out in a country where everyone’s doing a pretty good job of being pretty good.] 

Updike, whose earliest fiction has always focused on a love of life - and fear of losing it - "gets into" the mind of a teenager who could throw life away. Bigots blame Islam, but we've had suicide bombers in the West for over a century (read Henry James's novel about a suicide bomber, Princess Cassamassima, ca. 1895). We have in America numerous examples of terrorist-suicide teens in the last twenty years (Columbine ... Pearl, Mississippi...) Some bloggers derided Updike after he told an interviewer that the first draft focused on a Catholic priest -- and a blogger asked rhetorically, "He thinks a CHRISTIAN would do that?" Well, sure -- we've got examples of preachers and priests gone bad in this country, misguided followers who smuggled weapons, shot government officials, and / or poisoned themselves. So it's not a stretch to say that Updike's terrorist is no alien, and understanding him would be understanding something about ourselves.

Understand what, exactly? Updike's real subject here isn't terrorism, politics, jihad, or Islam: it's feeling the absence of God. A line from the Koran (Qu'ran) about God's being closer to a believer "than the vein in his neck" keeps recurring, as the young jihadist, who has no father or siblings -- thinks of God as a kind of brother whose presence he feels intensely. But much else of what the boy sees, feels, and learns makes him question that presence -- in a public high school, in a convenience store, in Islamic study with a cynical teacher, in the truck that he delivers furniture in, not to mention on public media and advertisements.

The teen Ahmad is the focus, but all the other characters are dealing with the same feelings, and their faith (or lost faith) is equally challenged. These include Ahmad's 60-something atheist Jewish "college counselor," the boy's lapsed Catholic Irish mom, the advisor's voracious and fat wife, her work-obsessed sister, and the sister's boss -- Secretary of Homeland Security.

At the moment of the story when Ahmad becomes aware that he is involved with a terrorist cell, he remembers the old school's motto, "Knowledge is freedom," and thinks, "Knowledge can also be a prison, with no way out once you're in." A couple of pages later, his mother is discussing Ahmad with Jack, the counselor, who suggests the same thing from another angle:

"There's a certain hunger for, I don't know, the absolute, when everything is so relative, and all the economic forces are pushing instant gratification and credit-card debt at [kids today]. ...People want to go back to simple -- black and white, right and wrong, when things aren't simple."
"So my son is simple-minded."
"In a way. But so is most of mankind. Otherwise, being human is too tough. Unlike the other animals, we know too much. They, the other animals, know just enough to get the job done and die."

A few pages later, Ahmad admits that he fears how education might weaken his faith.

I won't spoil the ending. Suffice it to say, it's both a surprise and perfectly fitting, leading to a final sentence that feels exactly right.

08/01/2006 | Fiction, Religion