[caption id="attachment_66776" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="John Updike giving the Jefferson Lecture in 2008, the year before his death."]
Spoiler Alert: Some key plot details will be revealed here about the 2006 novel under discussion.
A Guardian critic wrote a few years back that the attempts by some of the greatest writers in English - specifically the late John Updike, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie - to explore the motivations of terrorists were admirable, but ultimately disappointing. Her view was that they relied too much on research and less on imagination.
Still, any work by any of that trio is worth reading, and Updike's second last novel, "The Terrorist," is certainly no exception. The central figure is 18-year-old New Jersey native Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy. He idolizes his absent father, an Egyptian who abandoned him when he was three. His mother is Teresa Mulloy, an aspiring Irish-American artist. She was raised Catholic, but no longer practices. (She's known as Terry, but if there's any significance in the closeness of her name to Brando's "On the Waterfront" character, I didn't get it.) Ahmad, though, has been tutored, since age 11 or 12, by a fundamentalist imam.
Among the other main characters are his school's guidance counselor Jack Levy, who is Jewish, and Charlie Chehab, a member of the Lebanese Muslim family that owns Excellency Home Furnishings and gives him his first job -- as a truck driver. Earlier Ahmad rejects the university track encouraged by Jack in favor of vocational courses recommended by the imam
The humorous and voluble Charlie joins him sometimes in the truck and becomes a mentor of sorts. A history buff, he tells Ahmad about tactics used against the British during the Revolutionary War. At one point in his story, Charlie refers to the Americans as "we." He may seem to have an ambivalent attitude towards those of his co-religionists who would harm the United States, but the reader feels that that's just defensiveness. I was taken aback, then, at the juncture at which he recruits Ahmad into a terrorist cell and involves him in a plot to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. I thought that the great master Updike had erred. But when later it's revealed that Charlie is a CIA operative executing an elaborate sting (and is killed for his trouble), all is well again with the fictional world. It turns out that Updike's use of the first person plural in relation to Americans, past and present, is just perfect.
Self-destruct button
Some politicians conduct their personal lives as if it were a game of "Catch me if you can!" Its rules require that they make some effort to cover their tracks. But then you have that new category of public figure, notably two ex-congressman from New York: Anthony Weiner and Chris Lee, that married GOP guy from Upstate who was looking for dating opportunities on Craigslist. They seem to have been saying: "Catch me, please!" There's a difference between a reckless streak and a self-destruct button. Both Lee and Weiner had the latter. I was amused, then, that some readers got the idea that I was defending Weiner in an item I wrote a while back about Andrew Breitbart, the conservative online publisher who brought him down. I wasn't.
That item led to all sorts of misunderstandings, which I attribute to the heated tenor of debate generally in the country. People assume you're alleging the worst. Anyway, the context was Breitbart mocking the notion of foreign-born thinkers being included in an American studies program. A Chinese curse has it: "May you live in interesting times" and my view is that that helps Herbert Marcuse's case. He was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1898. He left Germany in 1933, and became a U.S. citizen in 1940. Its Marcuse's leftist ideas that Breitbart really objects to. Welfare queen Ayn Rand's foreignness, or indeed her atheism, has never been much of a problem for her admirers like Congressman Paul Ryan.
