Updike and his Jew

John Updike has a new novel out. About terrorism.

But there has to be a Jew involved, right?

Here are excerpts on that aspect from a review by Jonathan Raban published here.

In Terrorist, John Updike has built a marvelously seedy cityscape in which to lodge his fictional jihadists. New Prospect, New Jersey (which shares much the same geographical coordinates as Paterson) was in its heyday in the nineteenth century as a mill town: since then, it has fallen into lax decrepitude.

Ahmad Mulloy is a not untypical product of the New Prospect melting pot: the son of an Egyptian father who decamped when he was three, he has been brought up by his lapsed-Catholic Irish-American mother, who is a nurse, a cigarette smoker, and the painter of the gaudy abstracts that decorate the thin walls of their scruffy rented apartment.

First met in the novel when he is eighteen, on the verge of his high school graduation...

...Ahmad's destiny is made plain by the title of the book. In the first chapter he tells Jack Levy, the nonpracticing Jew who is his high school guidance counselor, that Shaikh Rashid has advised him against going to college and set him on the "voke" track so that he can learn to be a truck driver. Lest one miss the implications of this career, Levy hammers them home:

Drive a truck? What kind of truck? There are trucks and trucks. You're only eighteen;...

...A few pages earlier, Levy, glooming over the unlovely dawn view of his hometown, has remarked to his wife, "This whole neighborhood could do with a good bomb." Long before Ahmad himself knows his fate, the reader is aware that, by the end of the book, he's going to be at the wheel of a truck bomb.

...From the start, Ahmad mouths Islamist stock-in-trade generalities: Washington, D.C., is run by scheming Jews; the Kuffar (unbelievers) who surround him at his school are "devils," "unclean," "slaves to images"; those who are Christians worship a dead god; America is doing evil things in the Middle East.

...At one point Shaikh Rashid asks him, "Did you not discover that the world, in its American portion, emits a stench of waste and greed, of sensuality and futility, of the despair and lassitude that come with ignorance of the inspired wisdom of the Prophet?" To which Ahmad replies, "This isn't the fanciest part of the planet, I guess, and it has its share of losers, but I enjoyed being out in it, really. People are pretty nice, mostly." Moments later, he agrees to drive the suicide truck. "I will die...if it is the will of God."

...Nowhere is Ahmad, or the reader, exposed to the kind of intense political rage that has spurred terrorist attacks in the real world. The plotters go about their business as unemotionally as if they were planning a bank heist—but bank heists have an obvious motive, while the bomb in the Lincoln Tunnel appears to be motivated by little more than vague disgruntlement with the American way of life and, in Ahmad's case, a willingness to go against the grain of his own character in order to please his masters and give satisfaction to a god in whom he insecurely believes.

...If Ahmad's foreordained path toward the Lincoln Tunnel provides the strong narrative spine of the book, much of the flesh is supplied by scenes, reminiscent of the encounters between Dale Kohler and Roger Lambert in Roger's Version, that pit Ahmad's naive credulity against the world-weary skepticism of his high school counselor, Jack Levy. These exchanges are oddly written, more in the style of formal Socratic dialogues than the realistic speech of a conventional novel. In them, Faith speaks to Doubt, Doubt back to Faith, and their stiltedness is perhaps part of their essential point, as if Updike were summoning the language of Pilgrim's Progress or a medieval morality play.

Levy, married to an obese wife— who in herself embodies the excess, waste, and greed of American life as it is seen by the wire-thin Shaikh Rashid —is, at sixty-three, fast becoming indifferent to the prospect of his own death:

Jack Levy's sole remaining task is to die and thus contribute a little space, a little breathing room, to this overburdened planet. The task hangs in the air just above his insomniac face like a cobweb with a motionless spider in the center.
So Levy faces the atheist's oblivion, Ahmad the sensual paradise of the Islamist martyr. Yet Levy, decent teacher that he is, is firmly on the side of life, for his students if not himself. Thus conjoined by fate with Ahmad (and also, for this is an Updike novel, with Ahmad's forty-something mother, Terry, via her "perfect, gorgeous XXXX"), Levy is destined to share the ride to the tunnel so that there can be a protracted wordy showdown between bluff school counseling and deluded juvenile religious belief.

But an inordinate amount of novelistic hard labor is required to get the pair together in the truck, en route for the big bang that will open the tunnel to the Hudson River....It just so happens that the considerable city of New Prospect has a single entry ramp onto Interstate 80, so that Jack Levy can intercept the truck bomb when it is conveniently stopped at a red light (and, astonishingly, ever-polite Ahmad will open the passenger door and let him in). Again and again, one's made aware of the novelist forcing the characters and the world around them to conform to his will. In a novel suffused with fear of religious totalitarianism, it's unnerving to find Updike himself playing the role of a tyrannical god.

Between New Prospect and the tunnel, the stop-go rush-hour traffic moves slowly enough to allow Ahmad and Levy a last leisurely debate. The red button is between their seats, the minutes are ticking down, but they speak as if they were in a not-too-interesting social studies class:

Levy says, "I can't believe you're seriously intending to kill hundreds of innocent people."

"Who says unbelief is innocent? Unbelievers say that. God says, in the Qur'an, Be ruthless to unbelievers. Burn them, crush them, because they have forgotten God. They think to be themselves is sufficient. They love this present life more than the next."

"So kill them now. That seems pretty severe."

"It would to you, of course. You are a lapsed Jew, I believe. You believe nothing. In the third sura of the Qur'an it says that not all the gold in the world can ransom those who once believed and now disbelieve, and that God will never accept their repentance."

Mr. Levy sighs. Ahmad can hear moisture, little droplets of fear, rattle in his breath. "Yeah, well, there's a lot of repulsive and ridiculous stuff in the Torah, too....The priests try to control people through fear...."

We Jews just can't win. Either we're the cause of terorism or we contribute to it or we are too dumb to stop it. That's a WASP for you.