"Terrorist": A character-building battle with the devil

"Terrorist"
by John Updike
Knopf, 310 pp., $25

New Prospect, N.J., has long failed to live up to its name. Vacant lots where homes and businesses once stood accumulate trash and rubble and, with few exceptions, the lives of the townspeople seem as blighted as the landscape. One of those townspeople, Jack Levy, a guidance counselor at the high school, remembers when the neighborhoods featured "flowering trees and vegetable gardens, clotheslines and swing sets."

Now he sees "a few scruffy bushes," which "fought for carbon dioxide and damp soil between concrete walks and asphalt parking spaces." And the people are no less starved and stunted: "Discarded divorcees and obsolete craftsmen in outsourced industries and hardworking people of color ... move into the neighborhood and can't afford to leave." No wonder that Levy marks many of his students' folders with a code: hopeless case.

But one thing flourishes. Ahmad Mulloy, son of an Egyptian father and an Irish-American mother, has grown tall — and strong in his conviction that America's superficiality and relativistic morality are the work of the devil, that only Islam offers truth and salvation. A senior at New Prospect High, he has decided to follow his Imam's advice and become a truck driver. The higher education that Levy encourages him to pursue? More work of the devil.

John Updike's "Terrorist" unfolds in a tense, unacknowledged duel between Levy's weary but basically humane world view and Ahmad's energetic but dehumanizing vision. In their interviews about Ahmad's future, Levy can sense the young man's yearning to do good as well as his deep potential to do harm — although how much harm Levy doesn't suspect, at first.

Updike's unparalleled ability to evoke the sensuous immediacy of the world makes us feel Ahmad's alienation. The youth's sharply attuned senses drive him even from those who would help him. Levy's very smell repels him, "a compounded extract of sweat and alcohol, Jewishness and Godlessness, a powerfully unclean stink." The mere presence of a young woman he likes, as "sunlight sticks its glistening tongue into the cavity at the center of her scoopneck blouse," compels him to remind himself and her, "I am a good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith."

A way opens before him. Updike carries us along as Ahmad takes one step and then another and another, as the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable but desirable. For Ahmad, the real terror is the life toward which his blighted world seems to be pushing him. Blinded by his own ideals, Ahmad sees not human beings, but "doomed animals gathered in the odor of mating and mischief." What, after all, are such lives worth except as sacrifices to signify his unwavering faith in his God? Yet there is a surprising power in his aging guidance counselor to show the value of these people who to Ahmad seem utterly soulless.

In "Terrorist," John Updike humanizes a young man who has seemed intent upon dehumanizing others. And to be human, after all, is to be redeemable.

Richard Wakefield, a Tacoma Community College instructor, recently won the 2006 Richard Wilbur Award, one of the nation's largest poetry prizes for formal verse.