This is a review by Harpers Magazine. Looks like an interesting book, by John Updike.
A FANATICAL MIND
Boyers, Robert
4493 words
1 July 2006
Harper's Magazine
89
Volume 313; Issue 1874; ISSN: 0017789X
English
Copyright (c) 2006 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.
FANATICAL MIND Discussed in this essay: Terrorist, by John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf. 310 pages. $25.
The novelist and the terrorist
We need only think of classic works by Stendhal and Dostoevsky, Malraux and Koestler, to remind ourselves that politics has long been an attractive subject for novelists; often the issues routinely covered by journalists in terse newspaper accounts come alive for us in fiction. It isn't surprising, then, that some of our best writers now hope to tell us more about terrorism than we can learn from the op-ed pages of the New York Times. No doubt academic books will soon be devoted to something called "the terrorist novel," and scholars will again debate such hoary topics as the ability of fiction to do justice to politics and to reality itself.
When such debates begin in earnest, they will probably make mention of the new novel by John Updike. In Terrorist, Updike presents us with an Islamic fanatic, an eighteenyear-old high school student named Ahmad, who is persuaded to commit a terrible deed that seems to him the inevitable expression of his faithfulness. The portrait is troubling on several counts. For one, the boy has not the slightest misgiving or reluctance about the crime he is determined to commit, so that, for all of his earnestness and innocence, his scrupulous adherence to the teachings of his masters, his occasional eruptions of sexual desire and insecurity, he seems to us something of a monster. For another, we cannot but wonder why we should be interested in a figure so simple and single-minded, a figure who is never indiscreet or tormented, whose faith is a rottenness of certitudes. There is no poetry in this character, no trace of imagination, no eloquent doubt. In spite of Updike's efforts to surround Ahmad with temptation, with varieties of coarseness and color, the boy is so subordinated to his fanatic vocation as to seem out of reach of ordinary fellow feeling, without the vitality of cynicism or recklessness. We can believe in such a character, but he cannot inspire in us solicitude or pity or even loathing.
We can believe in Ahmad's world too, since it is, in most respects, blandly familiar. The kids at Ahmad's New Jersey high school have "soft bodies and alluring hair," and his alienated view of them doesn't make them more than standard-issue obnoxious adolescents. Just so, the Islamic mentor at the local mosque is entirely predictable in his awful piety, a man by his own lights reasonably guiding his youthful acolyte on the path to paradise. Terrorist mainly revolves within the narrow circuit of Ahmad's experience, venturing occasionally into the lives of his intimates and acquaintances. The story line, such as it is, contains few surprises. Ahmad goes to school, has modestly friendly relations with his blithely unaware mother, talks with a guidance counselor who becomes interested in the boy (and in the mother), and moves inexorably forward on his fateful course. For all the vividness of Updike's portraiture, the other characters exist largely as types: the mother, a baby-boomer transgressive; the guidance counselor, a gray, disappointed little man with some heart; the imam, just scrupulous enough to remind the boy he sends on a suicide mission that the boy hasn't been "coerced."
The novel also introduces us to a Lebanese immigrant family, chiefly an elderly father and a son, who own a furniture store and together represent the stresses and gratifications of secular Islamic experience in the American diaspora. Ahmad drives a truck for these people, and he is privy to their disputes without ever engaging with what they say. Is America the great Satan? Is it an obvious improvement on the "Old World"? Can Islamic immigrants prosper if only each one, as the father says, "does his job" and "obeys the laws"? Ahmad overhears it all, including the resentful effusions of the son, Charlie, only to reply woodenly, when asked where he stands, that Americans "brag of freedom, but freedom to no purpose becomes a kind of prison." Charlie himself is a standard Islamic leftist, spewing anti-American slogans, and the father is an amiable two-dimensional throwback to an era when immigrants could embrace the American dream without misgiving. By the time we learn that Charlie is not who he seems, we don't much care who or what he is, so little is the novel genuinely invested in him.
Updike has been tempted by politics in a number of earlier novels, including The Coup and, more recently, Toward the End of Time, but in no previous work has he inhabited a perspective so forbidding and inimical. The son of an IrishAmerican mother and an absentee Egyptian father, Updike's Ahmad permits the novelist to register the effects of a rigorous fundamentalist "education" on a vulnerable young man hungry for indoctrination. Everywhere there are "infidel Americans," "Jewish devils," "the Zionist-dominated federal government," "enemies of the true faith," "selfish and materialistic" consumers, "the sex-obsessed West"-so predictable and unremitting are the formulas as they roll out, one after another, that one struggles in vain to take them seriously. What follows from those formulas, of course, is another matter. When Ahmad tells his friend that "all unbelievers are our enemies" and that "the Prophet said that eventually all unbelievers must be destroyed," we can see how the enslavement of young men like Ahmad in such a belief system may well have grave political consequences that we ignore at our peril.
Yet Terrorist is not much interested in politics after all. Although it may be tempting to compare this novel to classic novels about terrorists by Dostoevsky and Henry James, among others, the comparison serves mainly to point out the relative thinness of Updike's political imagination. Updike makes little effort to consider, as if it warranted thoughtful consideration, the critique of consumerist Western society that informs Ahmad's cartoonish formulations. Nowhere is anyone permitted to think seriously about the deficiencies, corruptions, and inequalities of the America that inspires such loathing. Nowhere in the novel is there the slightest suggestion that Ahmad's impatience with this world is anything but a reflection of his overheated, hopelessly puerile religious imagination. Political ideas circulate sporadically in Terrorist, but Updike doesn't seem to believe that they can lead us where we wish to go. Instead, political ideas are presented here as repositories of platitudes and warmed-over certainties. When the secretary for Homeland security, a minor character in Terrorist, asks his assistant why "they want to do those horrible things" and "why do they hate us," the questions are put with no sense that politics-in this case, a critique of globalization and market capitalism-will help to provide answers. "They hate the light," his assistant replies, and though we are given to understand that this is hardly an adequate explanation, Updike apparently expects us to know better than to rely on political analysis for greater understanding.
In one sense this is a refreshing course for the novelist to adopt. After all, politics does not account for everything in our lives, and the standard political categories-freedom vs. tyranny, the open society vs. the closed society, citizens vs. subjects-are not necessarily relevant to the conflicts that preoccupy us now. In his resistance to sustained political argument, Updike might be a useful, if limited, guide to present realities, in which religious zealotry counts for a great deal more than hardheaded political "realists" wish to believe. No American novelist has found in the actual world so satisfactory and consuming a consolation as Updike has over the course of his long career, and he may be on to something in suggesting that the new Islamic fundamentalists are frightening principally because they have so little attachment to the things of this world. Ahmad is moved to hatred of America not in the main because of its political principles but because his head has been filled with ideas that portray the world as ugly and deceitful, a place of defilement and shame. For all of his vulnerability, he is resistant to any conceivable entreaty. His settled disdain removes from him any prospect of growth or enlightenment.
Oddly, young Ahmad in some ways resembles the seasoned, utterly secular terrorists in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, who are apt to say of ordinary human beings, "I am not impressed by them. Therefore they are inferior," or, "they depend on life ... whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked." The accent is not identical, and Ahmad is but an innocent compared with Conrad's anarchist professionals. And yet Ahmad speaks with a comparable authority when, moments before he is to detonate a bomb, he tells Jack Levy, his guidance counselor: "Sir, I regret to say you will not live. In a few minutes I am going to see the face of God. My heart overflows with the expectation." Ahmad is impressive, as Conrad says of his own character, in "the extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions." These are individuals who see but do not see, who are insulated from ordinary feelings by the singleness of their consuming idea.
Because Ahmad's closed system fatally insulates him from reality, Updike is determined to provide in his novel palpable though rarely lovely attributes of the world. He amply elaborates the kinds of information we expect from fiction, information that includes sensual particulars, stabs of feeling, and vagrant signs of the world's pungent disorder. Most often in Updike's work, sex is the surest token of reality, and Ahmad is not alone in responding to its call. The music of erotic excitement is a familiar one, and Updike has played it so long, over so many narratives, that he is expert in capturing its chords and grace notes. No surprise that in Terrorist a woman's breasts should be likened to "inverted bowls, the size for breakfast cereal, with nipples hard as a single blueberry," or that Jack, the guidance counselor, is fixed on the "pearly swell" of a belly, "the cedarcolored patch of frizzy hair," the "doughy softness" of a body that calls to mind "white bread without the crust." Ahmad has his moments of arousal as well, gets to be dazzled briefly by "the brown" of breasts "dark as eggplants," but he is always primed to think of himself and everyone else as "smelly animals, really, with a little bunch of animal needs and shorter lives than turtles." In all of the passages devoted to sex in Terrorist, whether involving Ahmad or others, there is an unmistakable whiff of the transgressive. But sex here is not (as it is in much of Philip Roth) genuinely vile or revolting: its power is cruel only in making spiritual discipline seem rather willed and paltry by contrast. For Updike, sex is an irrepressible fever in the blood, a reproach to every conceivable form of high-mindedness.
But reality assumes several other guises in Terrorist. Because Ahmad's project entails a fatal separation from the world, a cutting off of ordinary sympathies and expectations, Updike registers the weight of that separation by allowing us to savor the satisfactions of intimacy and connection that Ahmad wishes to renounce. The boy's contempt is a steady feature of the novel, but his own mother has none of that contempt. In drawing her as a "freckled and flushed" "free spirit" with "clunky turquoise rings" on her "firmfleshed hands," Updike has created a counterweight to the son. Although she is a type, she is as resistant to caricature as her son is amenable to it. She is by turns robust and defeated, tender and acerbic. The occasional bearer of insights, she is not in the main a dispenser of truths, and whenever Updike turns to her we understand that his imagination is fired by the world as it is.
Reality is also sharply evoked in the many pages of the book given over to Jack Levy. He is, as the boy senses, an "unhappy Jew," and "the scent of unhappiness rolls off' him, even when he is sexually aroused (by Ahmad's mother) and briefly hopeful. At sixtythree, he is not at all reluctant to declare that "dust to dust's my sense of it all," but he surprises with his capacity to absorb insult, his blundering, and his improbable goodwill. A man who has made a modest pact with reality, who is unconcerned with ultimate questions and wants mainly to pass the time as painlessly as possible, Jack Levy is so fully present in the novel that he further certifies Updike's commitment to the things of this world.
In attempting to penetrate the consciousness of a fanatic, a novelist must confront the gap between the fanatic's sour view of the world and the actual world he wishes to attack and abandon. A novel like Henry James's The Princess Casamassima succeeds by representing an absorption in the future as potentially damaging, inimical to one's sense of reality. James's character Hyacinth Robinson, assigned to commit a terrorist act, sees a great deal more of what there is to see in life than Updike's Ahmad, but both novelists challenge their young men to take in what James called the "public show," the "innumerable appearances." Where Hyacinth is open, responsive, greedily devouring every impression, Ahmad shuts himself off; where Hyacinth is overwhelmed by the awfulness of the renunciation he has been ordered to make, Ahmad welcomes the nullity and death he has been offered. For all of the time Ahmad spends with his mother and with Jack, he cannot open himself to them; their America is to him only the devil's playground-which is to say, a nothingness.
Ahmad's failure, in James's terms, to "vibrate to as many occasions" as his author can "venture to make him," consigns him to a kind of smallness, a meagerness. Although Updike may want his readers to regard Ahmad with a modicum of sympathy, the character remains at best a credible cipher. Unlike Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima, who is not only a more richly endowed figure but also someone we get to know long before he is enlisted in the terrorist project, Ahmad is a fully indoctrinated robot from the moment we meet him, disastrously enwombed in a pathetic and delusional idea whose consequences he has no way of imagining. Nor has he any way of differentiating among the persons he meets or among the possible meanings of the facts that unfold, however dimly, before his shuttered eyes. The categorical formulas he utters, his inability to think without recourse to the clichéd language of "infidels" and "devils," his immurement in hatred and rejection, all indicate that for him the world has lost its reality, its variousness and texture.
Updike's determination to stick with Ahmad throughout the course of his novel is, in novelistic terms at least, quite dangerous. Although Ahmad occasionally confronts others outside his belief system, he is permitted more or less total domination of the book; there is nothing out there to effectually check or break the "truth" that speaks through him. To be sure, there is no danger that Ahmad's truth will seem to us to be recommended by the novel; if that were even remotely conceivable, the book would stir and provoke us a good deal more than it does. No, the danger has to do with our sense that the poverty of Ahmad's truth is selfevident, that all Updike needs to do is to allow the boy and his mentor to think and speak in order to make their beliefs seem to us transparently idiotic and reprehensible.
The danger courted by Updike, in other words, is that Terrorist should appear to be a complacent novel. The term "complacent" has too often been leveled at Updike, so that it has become something like the received wisdom about this extraordinarily nimble and often surprising writer. But complacency is what you get when you set in motion a work that seems to know all too well what it thinks on all of the crucial issues and has no instinct for the sort of ferocious contention that underwrites a serious fiction of ideas and politics. Updike has created an evildoer who, in signal respects, calls to mind the "banality" anatomized many years ago by Hannah Arendt, whose Adolf Eichmann was defined by a "quite authentic inability to think." That is why we feel that Ahmad is someone with whom it is not possible to argue. In his peripheral characters, moreover, Updike has created people whose ability to contend with Ahmad is thoroughly compromised-who, whether because they are weary and hopeless or merely decent and tolerant, lack the required force of conviction. These characters are too moderate (or, in the case of the Secretary for Homeland Security, too plodding and unimaginative) to he pitted against fanaticism. And if that fact seems to us true to reality in its way, it is nonetheless, in novelistic terms, most unfortunate.
For what is lacking in this novel is the drama of contending ideas. Updike provides fixed positions and a vaguely plausible outline of essential differences, but he has no instinct for the stir of controversy and the exhausting, interminable contest of deeply clashing forces. Updike may understand that ideology is a great sickness of soul and intellect; he may know, as Irving Howe once wrote, that "ideology can cripple human impulses, blind men to simple facts, make them monsters by tempting them into that fatal habit which anthropologists call 'reifying' ideas." But Updike is without that powerful attraction to ideas that can make his fear of them dramatic and compelling. It is not that he has no interest in ideas. It is that he is merely interested in them, merely adept at showing one or two, holding them up to the light, letting them be, at most setting them alongside other ideas that do not much tempt him or us. When I read Dostoevsky's The Possessed, 1 feel, as Howe says, that Dostoevsky "scours all the possibilities" of his characters, that he does not safely know what might be the result of the unremitting contention he insists upon. But Updike cannot bring himself to scour all the possibilities and does safely know what he feels he needs to know.
In J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, Dostoevsky is himself a principal character who confronts the anarchist Nechaev (the inspiration for the character Peter Verkhovensky in The Possessed). Ncchacv has only an inveterate contempt for others-in his case, for gentlemen and liberals and all defenders of every status quo. But he is also a man of spirit, a force, a worthy foe. In Terrorist, Ahmad is a monster of mediocrity whose measure is easily taken. Updike gives him not a single good line, not a single agile or compelling or original thought, and though we might not want to believe that such a boy deserves to be given more than Updike allows, the resulting impoverishment of novelistic tension follows from this essential condition of the enterprise. It is impossible to imagine a serious person vying with Ahmad, as Dostoevsky does with Nechaev in The Master of Petersburg, only to come away feeling shaken to the core, confessing to himself that "he no longer knows where the mastery lies-whether he is playing with Nechaev or Nechaev with him." Impossible also to imagine Ahmad swelling with his own dialectical brilliance and cunning, giving "a laugh of the purest exhilaration," bristling with pleasure at his own relentless "overstepping" of bounds.
In fact, the very term "playing," to which Coetzee's Dostoevsky character resorts, is itself enormously telling here. Ahmad is numbingly earnest. Even when he is being offered oral sex by a naked girl, he speaks in the usual stolid accents of his discipline ("I still hold to the Straight Path.... Islam is still my comfort and guide"). There is no play in this boy, no lively thrust and parry in his demeanor. His range extends occasionally to reluctant observation, timid engagement, bitter disappointment, but never to disputation. He knows none of the play of the mind that makes the terrorist of Coetzee's novel exhilarating and difficult, and he is not at all inclined to any species of risk, knowing in his heart that what he believes is indisputably right. When Nechaev goes "too far" in provoking his antagonist, he asks, merry and insolent, "Why so silent? Has the knife come too close to the bone?" We miss that tone in Terrorist, the accent of excited, nervous irritability that makes complacency impossible. I sense that Updike is by no means shaken by his encounter with Ahmad, for he feels that he knows Ahmad well enough, and that this is about as much as anyone can aspire to. No need, with such a figure, to suppose that language and reason are inadequate to encompass their objective, to penetrate the heart of Ahmad's darkness; nor to suppose that the real world, in all of its contradictoriness and strangeness, cannot be efficiently encompassed with deft novelistic strokes, politics encapsulated in neatly isolated glimpses.
Can we imagine a novel focused on a character like Ahmad that would somehow handle the material with greater success? Perhaps it is a mistake to subject to that sort of speculation a novel so rigorously obedient to its own laws and constraints. I can admire a novel that works within the logic of its own premises, that doesn't pretend to be what it isn't. But in Terrorist there is an obedience that makes a fetish out of its own selfimposed limitations. Are there not other kinds of true believers who might cause someone like Ahmad to hesitate, force him to let into his heavily armored consciousness some insinuating slivers of light? Updike does not in fact test Ahmad in the faith as he might have done. That is why, as we read this novel, we are not persuaded that the author has assembled things so as to hunt down a truth he does not already securely possess. There is as little mystery in Ahmad as there is in the young hooded men we confront in DeLillo's 1991 novel, Mao II, in which "the boys who work near Abu Rashid have no face or speech. Their features are identical.... They don't need their own features or voices. , They are surrendering those things to something powerful and great." These are ciphers with a vengeance.
But DeLillo doesn't allow the featureless boys to dominate his novel. They are emblematic, constitutive in their way of something terrifying that DeLillo has persistently labored to plumb and encompass without suggesting that he is satisfied with the results of the operation. That very indeterminacy is itself an object of scrutiny in Mao II, a novel that is permeated by a sense that nothing can be done to effectually oppose the drift of things toward "ready-made terms and empty repetitions," "simple formulas . . . memorized and passed on." Volition and the attachment to life itself are subordinated to a longing for a comprehensive single truth. For all of this, Moo II is still a desperate work, ever pressing forward to look for openings and analogies, testing its knowledge against this thing and that, registering as it goes its sense that this will not do, nor this, nor this.
Updike, by contrast, in the framework of the very novel he conceived, really did have available to him another kind of resource altogether. By setting his novel in the United States, rather than in a Pakistani madrasah or Taliban redoubt, he granted himself the opportunity to pit Ahmad against other kinds of characters who might have moved Ahmad in a meaningful way. But apart from the mentor who prepares him for death, Ahmad encounters no one who hungers for exaltation, for singleness, no one who is gripped by the need to ask the questions essential to the faithful: What authority consecrates for each of us the path ahead? Why should we live in this way rather than that? These are not burning questions for Ahmad's mother or for his school guidance counselor; nor, indeed, for his schoolmates and associates. Likewise, the Lebanese father and son offer no evidence of a turbulent inner life. The boy thus exists in a world in which no one but fanatics have the slightest inclination to suppose that there is something beyond our physical being and that there is a true path for us to follow. And this is a misfortune not only for Ahmad himself but also for any prospect of resistance that might have enriched and complicated this novel.
It is one thing to say that Updike has given us a protagonist in whom we can believe-whose credibility indeed derives from his resemblance to the real-life fanatics we read about in newspapers and magazines. But it is another thing to say that Updike has therefore provided us with an account of the truth we want from novels. Novels are not, at their best, perfectly systematic and consistent. They find ways to subvert their own strategies and coherencies. If the world, at the present moment, offers us eighteen year-old terrorists who are cruel caricatures of faithfulness, the novelist can imagine other forms of faithfulness that are less susceptible to caricature; if politics, as it is presently advanced by its standard practitioners, would seem to have very little to say to (or about) the Ahmads of the world, then the novelist can imagine his way beyond such an impasse. Updike is too much the prisoner of fact in Terrorist, too inhibited by his sense that things are as they are. I would be more willing to grant him his view of the present situation if he had seriously tested the notion that faith and a decent regard for others-for the world-are inevitably incompatible.
No doubt academic books will soon be devoted to something called "the terrorist novel," and scholars will again debate such hoary topics as the ability of fiction to do justice to politics and to reality itself. The novel also introduces us to a Lebanese immigrant family, chiefly an elderly father and a son, who own a furniture store and together represent the stresses and gratifications of secular Islamic experience in the American Diaspora.
Copyright Harper's Magazine Foundation Jul 2006 | Robert Boyers is the editor of Salmagundi. His most recent books are The Dictator's Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists and Excitable Women, Damaged Men, a collection of short stories. His last review for Harper's Magazine, "Clues That Leaa Nowhere," appeared in the March issue.