Fat is everywhere. There’s even a term for the fat squeezed up from the waist of a woman’s too-tight jeans: the “muffin top.” In our self-flagellating society, it’s an article of faith that we’re all too fat, overfed on Z-grade Big Mac meat, freedom fries sautéed in beef tallow. The public gorged itself on Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me, only to doze off into an ursine contentment. On the one sausage-fingered hand, it’s penance to mock “our” fat; on the other, it’s bad manners to tell an individual that he ought to lose a few.
The intellectual elite, for all its claims to love nuance and complexity, prefers announcing the problems of large groups (fast food, consumer culture) to analyzing the pathologies of a man on the street. And so I hoped that John Updike’s Terrorist, which follows the crooked path of a New Jersey high-school boy named Ahmad Ashmawy, would leave behind the root casuistry so popular among commentators on terrorism—the dubious threat of Mickey D’s imperialism, the all-purpose bogeyman of Third World poverty vs. our own fleshy overabundance.
In short, I hoped that Updike would give us a person, unfamiliar and unpredictable as we expect a potential murderer to be.
Why do they hate us? is a tired question, one which plays no part in winning a war. Why do they hate us enough to choose suicide and murder? is, however, an excellent question for a novelist and for all students of morality and human behavior. An excellent question, but also a very difficult one, for John Updike as for anybody else.
I didn’t wish to see Ahmad “humanized,” any more than I wished to see him portrayed as some Muslim Dracula. A funny concept, “humanize.” The British and Canadian docudrama The Hamburg Cell, which depicts the machinations of a sleeper cell involved in the September 11 massacre, features a scene in which the United 93 hijacker Ziad Jarrah calls his girlfriend, just before takeoff, and tells her “I love you” again and again. Well, so what? Are we to be shocked that a man capable of evil is also capable of human feeling? If evil is freely chosen, it’s only one among many choices—but it’s also the one that should concern us most.
For Ahmad and his guidance counselor Jack Levy and his Irish mother Teresa Mulloy (who is also the Updike-surrogate Levy’s mistress), our country’s problems boil down (should I say render?) to fat. On page two, Ahmad scorns the “puffy bodies” of his teachers. When we meet his love-hate interest, a black siren named Joryleen Grant, “the tops of her breasts push up like great blisters in . . . the indecent top that at its other hem exposes the fat of her belly.” If Levy takes his wife to a restaurant, they must sit at “a corner table where Beth can squeeze in, never a booth.”
That’s Updike’s tamest dig at Beth, who wastes her days languishing in a La-Z-Boy (which Updike describes, like everything else, in such detail that the book reads like a guidebook for Martians) sucking down oatmeal cookies and soap operas. “As Jack Levy sees it,” Updike writes, “America is paved solid with fat and tar, a coast-to-coast tarbaby where we’re all stuck.”
That’s how Ahmad sees it, too, except that he plans to come unstuck at the next opportunity that Allah affords. He’s been taken under the shadowy wing of his imam, Shaikh Rashid, a gray-eyed villain who must look like a living, breathing Danish Cartoon. Ahmad studies the Qur’an, despises his whoring colleen of a mother (his Egyptian father has long been missing), and evidently has no idea why beard-plucking Shaikh al-Unsubtle might suggest that he get a Class C truck-driving license—making Ahmad just a hair less imaginative than Updike himself.
If our intelligence agencies were given half the clues available to Ahmad, Jack, Teresa, and Joryleen, we’d have far less to worry about from Islamic terrorism than Mayor McCheese does from the Hamburglar. Updike’s descriptions of the physical world, of people and architecture and tastes and odors, may at times recall Tintoretto, but his Terrorist plot is strictly Happy Meal coloring-book.
Then there’s the dialogue. I humbly submit that this book features the most head-spinningly terrible back-and-forth available outside of a Star Wars prequel. A few choice examples are in order. Updike, taking a cue from Ziad Jarrah, sends his boy-martyr to pay his final “I-love-yous” to his detested mother: “I wanted to thank you, for putting up with me all these years . . . . Without me, you would have had more freedom to be an artist, or whatever.” How about a Secretary of Homeland Security who exclaims, “I love this damn country so much I can’t imagine why anybody would want to bring it down!” If you buy that, there’s a tunnel in Manhattan I’d like to sell you—and then demolish with a couple tons of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer.
When Ahmad’s mother tells him, “I don’t know how much to credit your Mohommedanism,” he replies, “We don’t call it Mohammedanism, Mother. That sounds as if we worshipped Mohammed.” Nobody since Sir Richard Francis Burton has called Islam “Mohammedanism,” least of all the mother of a devout Muslim in post-9/11 America, but Updike can’t resist slipping in this elementary point.
It’s one thing for a DA on Law & Order to explain the Miranda warning to a cop for the benefit of those viewers who just flew in from a Siberian gulag, but Updike’s labored explication works against itself: He deploys his rather thin learning at the expense of verisimilitude. (Later, the Homeland Security secretary explains to his personal assistant that upping the color-coded threat level is a signal not just to the general public but also to law enforcement agencies. Thanks, boss!)
Terrorist would be a better work stripped of extraneous information—with which we’re already bludgeoned by the media—and left in the heads and emotional struggles of its characters. But Ahmad is a creature from the mind of an armchair analyst: He’s angry about fat people and slutty clothes and even his “track-meet ribbons, their cheap dye rapidly faded.” He’s troubled by the knotty battle between his religious faith and his sexual desires, a fact illustrated somewhat effectively by an accidental encounter, late in the book, between him and Joryleen. None of this is enough. His ambivalence and doubt are retailed for us at length, but they still feel store-bought and ready-made.
The crux of the book is Levy’s exchange with Ahmad, who’s piloting a Vesuvius-on-wheels toward the Lincoln Tunnel:
“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.”
Yes, it does. For all we know of terrorists, the things that disgust them and make them hate us, we’re no closer to learning why our own antipathies and disappointments have never stirred in us the murderous passion that they stir in our enemies.
Why are they, the terrorists, so different from us? As for Ahmad, plenty of kids hate high school, but few of them plot a Columbine massacre. Is religion the missing piece? There’s a point at which we have to confess that it’s faith, however dark, plus something else, something that most of us happily lack. Updike does make a few stabs at it, the best of them being at Ahmad’s pride: “Was his own faith . . . an adolescent vanity, a way of distinguishing himself from all those doomed others . . . the already dead, at Central High?” Ahmad imagines that he will be “of great interest to the news media.” He even imagines that his mother will “become momentarily famous. Perhaps there will be a spike in the sale of her paintings.”
This suspicion, that even the most pious enemy of the Great Satan is propelled by the same accelerant that’s fired everyone from Andy Warhol to Paris Hilton, should have been at the center of Updike’s treatment of his terrorist.
On September 10, 2001, Ziad Jarrah reportedly sent his girlfriend a note that read: “You should be very proud, it is an honor, and you will see the result, and everyone will be very happy.” Shaikh Rashid gives similar reassurances to Ahmad, who, in turn, becomes a black hole of self-love, as delighted by his own self-abnegation as by the supposedly divine principle that animates it. He is no longer a Global Issue, a phenomenon to be pondered by detached thinkers like Updike. He is a man about to act and to be responsible for what he does.
So is Levy, albeit a heroic one, when he puts his life on the line to dissuade Ahmad from killing hundreds of people. He tells the boy, “I was in the Army, you know, though they never sent me to Vietnam. That bothered me. I didn’t want to go, but I wanted to prove myself. You can understand that.”
It’s as Tolkein wrote of Beowulf: “He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy.” Many are driven by a desire to prove themselves; the tragedy is that many are forced to risk or lose their lives in so doing.
Still, that doesn’t mean there’s any equivalence between Ahmad’s murderous plot and Jack Levy forcing his way into the cab of Ahmad’s truck, and this distinction is obscured, though not entirely lost, in Updike’s attempt to make Ahmad a sympathetic or at least explicable character. One must not confuse the urge to prove oneself with the effect it produces, though perhaps the two are more closely aligned than we suppose. After all, we suspect that Levy tries to stop Ahmad because he selflessly loves Teresa. And we’re given a number of heavy-handed hints that, for Ahmad, serving Allah and playing Allah are one. There is a scene in which he spares the life of a bug: “Ahmad rises from his seat on the coarse plank step and stands over the insect in lordly fashion, feeling huge . . . . [H]e manages, after a few tentative, squeamish attempts, to flip the tiny creature at his mercy onto its legs.” We recall this when Ahmad muses on “the Meccan sura called the Blow, on the day when man shall become like scattered moths.”
Ahmad wishes to become the Blow, to scatter the moths. The fact that the insects at his mercy are enslaved to Big Macs and fries is incidental. If Americans were too thin, too fitness-obsessed, he’d hate them for their vanity. If they were Muslim, he’d hate them for not being devout enough. Whatever he looks at, the man consumed by pride will find in it some warrant of his superiority. Updike misses the point by focusing on flab, as though a personality like Ahmad’s could ever be appeased by the right behavior. When he implies that Ahmad got the way he is in all the easy, made-for-TV ways—absent father, emotionally absent mother, too much pop culture—he denies himself the only part of his mystery worth solving.