Terrorist by John Updike
There’s a common tendency to believe that a writer’s longest work must be his or her masterpiece. Therefore John Updike’s long, labored, multigenerational novel In the Beauty of the Lilies was widely praised, while Terrorist was dismissed as an example of the old man tackling a hot-button subject that he didn’t really understand.
Yet since the publication of Terrorist, I think we can say that In the Beauty of the Lilies not only isn’t Updike’s best novel, it’s not even his best novel set in northern New Jersey. Terrorist has the lightness, the deftness, and the sharp wit about serious matters that we look for in Updike. It captures its time in a way that few authors can manage (historical fiction is not really Updike’s thing). And it demonstrates that Updike hasn’t lost his nerve — not only in making his main character Ahmad an American teenager of Arab-Irish background who is drawn to jihad, but in touches like his hilarious yet believable pseudonymous portrait of Tom Ridge.
For my money, Updike succeeds admirably in entering Ahmad’s mind and world. The book is not an attempt to fathom the motivations of the 9/11 terrorists: Ahmad is motivated by his own mixture of restless intelligence, sexual urges, desire for order and purity, and disgust with Western materialism. He is most himself when he is alone, and the pages that describe his solitary night before his fateful mission are moving and suspenseful. His decision to act on his beliefs makes him even more solitary than before, and give him an eerie quality that impresses even hardened conspirators.
The interior space smells of oil-soaked concrete and an unexpected substance that Ahmad recognizes from two summers spent, in his mid-teens, as a junior member of a lawn crew: fertilizer. The caustic dry odor of it parches his nose and sinuses; there are also the scents of an acetylene welding torch and of closeted male bodies needing to be bathed and aired. Ahmad wonders if the men — two of them, the younger slender one and a stockier older, who turns out to be the technician — were among the four in the cottage on the Jersey Shore. He saw them for only a few minutes, in an unlit room and then through a dirty window, but they exuded this same sullen tension, as of distance runners who have trained too long. They resent being asked to talk. But they owe Charlie the deference paid a supplier and an arranger, at a level above them. Ahmad they regard with a kind of dread, as if, so soon to be a martyr, he is already a ghost.
Not surprisingly, Updike couples psychological insight with impressive research. Updike’s command of detail would be invaluable for anyone planning a terrorist attack or other major project.
Through the six-inch opening Ahmad smells the mixture of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer and nitro-methane racing fuel; he sees the ghostly-pale plastic drums, each as high as his waist and each holding one hundred sixty kilograms of the explosive mixture. The glossy white plastic of the containers glimmers like a species of flesh. Spliced yellow wires loop from the blasting caps, enhanced by aluminum powder and pentrite, which are embedded in the bottom of each drum. The twenty-five containers, he can make out in the shadows, have been arranged in a five-by-five square, neatly roped together with doubled clothesline and secured against sliding by taut attachments to the cleats and side bars within the truck body. The whole constitutes a work of modern art, assiduous and opaque.
