Jonathan Raban writes acutely and amusingly about John Updike's novel Terrorist in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books. Updike's protagonist, Ahmad Mulloy, is an adolescent Islamist raised in the fly-blown precincts of Paterson, New Jersey. Ahmad, Raban observes, is a "very Updikean adolescent":
painfully polite, self-conscious, intelligent, and a world-class noticer, someone who's barely capable of crossing the street or setting eyes on another human being without inventorizing his perceptions in a flight of rapt microscopy.
"Rapt miscropy" is lovely and true. Updike's prose "verbally caresses everything on which it alights", Raban observes later - even the inner life of a callow, East Coast salafist. And that might just be the problem with the novel, though Raban is much gentler with it than other reviewers, notably James Wood in the New Republic and Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic. For instance, Wood finds Updike systematically mangling free indirect style:
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.
Updike's rhapsodic attention to surfaces, Wood argues, disguises the fact that "Ahmad has no personality, no quiddity as
an eighteen-year-old American". Now Wood has made similar criticisms of Updike before: that his de luxe style is a sort of "seigneurial gratuity" or add-on which drains his books of all drama and agitation. Updike's novels, plump with style and all that strenuous "noticing", invite the question "whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey" (The Broken Estate, p. 232).
In Terrorist, the effect, in Wood's view, is to cripple Updike's attempt to broach the "central novelistic subject" of our age: "religious fundamentalism and its relation to Western secular society". The problem is that Updike's style "does not enable his dramatic functioning as a novelist, it actually nullifies it." Like any contemporary novelist exploring this subject, Updike is working in the admonitory shadow of Conrad's The Secret Agent. But if Woood is right, he has failed, as Conrad put it, to "make [us] see" his protagonist and thereby to disclose his motives (if not to make them intelligible).
Raban is altogether more tolerant of Updike's swooning lyricism than Wood, but he too is unpersuaded by his "flirtation with [this] important subject". However, where, for Wood, the causes of Updike's failure are essentially aesthetic, for Raban they lie elsewhere, in Updike's inability to take seriously the ideology of Islamism. Ahmad plans to explode a truck bomb in the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, but
Updike robs him of the last surviving shred of Islamist conviction and makes his presence in the truck seem little short of insane. One shouldn't, of course, belabor fiction with journalism and sociology, but the life stories of real suicide bombers make it plain that they were possessed by an intoxicating and deadly idea, first formulated by Qutb, which led them to attack the West in a spirit of single-minded passionate ferocity. Ahmad is not possessed by that idea: in his detached and garbled version, it's a harmless observation that verges on the fatuous. ... If only the novelist had spent more time dreaming himself into the paranoid and angry world of Qutb and his followers, and given Ahmad Mulloy sufficient intellectual and emotional wherewithal to jus-tify his adherence to the crooked path of righteous violence, Terrorist might have stood among Updike's best work. As it is, it conducts an energetic, entertaining, but disappointingly unconsummated flirtation with its important subject.