Well, I didn't hate it. John Updike's newest novel, Terrorist, is getting panned by all the usual suspects, and it's easy to understand why. It's a novel about an 18-year-old high-school mixed-race Muslim extremist named Ahmad that is structured like a clichéd paperback thriller and packed with efforts to be relevant—famously, Christopher Hitchens, in the Atlantic, tore both this novel and its author a new asshole for unconvincingly trying to namecheck J.Lo. Yes, well, ha-ha. Score one for modern society: If you can't seamlessly weave Jennifer Lopez into your novel, you clearly don't deserve your title as one of America's Greatest Novelists.
I haven't read Updike in years—in fact, I'm of the opinion that he's been lauded a few too many times—but Terrorist is full of sentences that surprised me. Here:
"Fuck you, Ahmad," she says, still with some gentleness, tentatively, her lower lip of its soft weight hanging loose a little. The saliva at the base of her gums sparks with reflected light from the overhead fluorescent tubes that keep the hall safely bright.
I could write about those two sentences for the rest of this review and still not explain exactly why they work so well—the "safely" alone, placed as an afterthought, but beautifully done, reflecting the themes of the novel. There's beauty everywhere in this book; not the inexplicable, magic sort of beauty, but the kind that inspires head-shaking admiration of its masterful foundation of words, seamlessly set together.
But scores of articles have been written about Updike's talent, and the question is whether Terrorist works as, you know, a novel. I'm not sure. The biggest problem I have is with a couple of teenage African-American characters, Joryleen and her boyfriend, Tylenol. Which is ridiculous enough—"The Ballad of Joryleen and Tylenol" sounds like an abandoned isn't-that-kinda-racist? Sarah Silverman song—but what Updike does to these characters is unforgivable. Our serious young protagonist, Ahmad, has a serious crush on Joryleen—in one tense scene, he attends a gospel concert at Joryleen's Christian church, against the wishes of his Muslim teachers. Tylenol frequently chases after Ahmad and tortures him, in that high-school way, although with lyrical, Updike curses. "You weird queer" doesn't sound very street, very "hippity-hop," which is a word that Updike unfortunately uses in the course of describing African-American music. Joryleen, a gospel-singing high schooler with some prospects, is literally whoring for amateur pimp Tylenol several months after graduation, a thoroughly unbelievable plot twist that occurs solely to shift Ahmad's conservative Islamic beliefs into Fatwa Overdrive.
Actually, this book has more problems with women than any Philip Roth novel since Portnoy's Complaint. Ahmad's mother floats blissfully along in a self-satisfied, multi-culti cloud, showing zero single-mom savvy. A guidance counselor at Ahmad's school has a wife who is so fat—how fat is she?—well, she's so fat that soon after she first appears in the novel, asleep, she is announced by the declaration: "The whale is awake." Oh, snap! There's a whole scene, later in the book, where she tries to find her remote control and thinks, fearfully, about bending over to pick something up. The results fall quite a bit short of Ulysses.
Most reviewers, though, are slamming Updike for trying to be topical, which is ridiculous. The last thing we need is more writers writing about what it's like to be a writer. That Updike has written outside his sphere of comfort is not what deserves a reprimand. Neither should he be taken to task for not composing a realistic high-school experience; he is 74 years old. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that he probably sees modern-day America, with its cowboy-idiot president and its terrorists skulking in retail-delivery jobs until they have the opportunity to unleash acts of jihad, as a bad potboiler thriller novel. So that's what he's given us. The world has changed and Updike, whose best books are very much of the last century, can't quite change with it. He can only stand and gape.
