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Summary
Summary
From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century--and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series: "A chilling tale that is perhaps the most essential novel to emerge from September 11" ( People ) about an eighteen-year-old devoted to Allah, who's convinced he's discovered God's purpose for him.
"The most satisfactory elements in Terrorist are those that remind us that no amount of special pleading can set us free of history, no matter how oblivious and unresponsive to it we may be." -- The New York Times Book Review
The terrorist of John Updike's title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three. Devoted to Allah and to the Qur'an as expounded by the imam of his neighborhood mosque, Ahmad feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping New Jersey factory town of New Prospect. Neither Jack Levy, his life-weary guidance counselor at Central High, nor Joryleen Grant, his seductive black classmate, succeeds in diverting Ahmad from what the Qur'an calls the Straight Path. Now driving a truck for a local Lebanese furniture store--a job arranged through his imam--Ahmad thinks he has discovered God's purpose for him. But to quote the Qur'an: Of those who plot, God is the best.
Author Notes
American novelist, poet, and critic John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University, which he attended on a scholarship, in 1954. After graduation, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. After returning from England in 1955, he worked for two years on the staff of The New Yorker. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with the magazine, during which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews.
Although Updike's first published book was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), his renown as a writer is based on his fiction, beginning with The Poorhouse Fair (1959). During his lifetime, he wrote more than 50 books and primarily focused on middle-class America and their major concerns---marriage, divorce, religion, materialism, and sex. Among his best-known works are the Rabbit tetrology---Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1988). Rabbit, Run introduces Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as a 26-year-old salesman of dime-store gadgets trapped in an unhappy marriage in a dismal Pennsylvania town, looking back wistfully on his days as a high school basketball star. Rabbit Redux takes up the story 10 years later, and Rabbit's relationship with representative figures of the 1960s enables Updike to provide social commentary in a story marked by mellow wisdom and compassion in spite of some shocking jolts. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry is comfortably middle-aged and complacent, and much of the book seems to satirize the country-club set and the swinging sexual/social life of Rabbit and his friends. Finally, in Rabbit at Rest, Harry arrives at the age where he must confront his mortality. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.
Updike's other novels range widely in subject and locale, from The Poorhouse Fair, about a home for the aged that seems to be a microcosm for society as a whole, through The Court (1978), about a revolution in Africa, to The Witches of Eastwick (1984), in which Updike tries to write from inside the sensibilities of three witches in contemporary New England. The Centaur (1963) is a subtle, complicated allegorical novel that won Updike the National Book Award in 1964. In addition to his novels, Updike also has written short stories, poems, critical essays, and reviews. Self-Consciousness (1989) is a memoir of his early life, his thoughts on issues such as the Vietnam War, and his attitude toward religion. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009 at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Along with Philip Roth, Updike remains our modern-day Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his work, he has examined the motivations of scientists (Roger's Book), the angst of aging high school basketball stars (the Rabbit tetralogy), and the sexual peccadilloes of ministers (A Month of Sundays). Here he captures the internal conflicts of an Islamic boy whose sights are set on martyrdom through a terrorist act. Ahmad, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father, joins a local mosque in New Prospect, NJ, at the age of 11. Soon he is entranced by the teachings of Islam, and the local imam takes the boy under his wing. By the time Ahmad is a high school senior, all that he sees around him is godless consumerism. After graduation, he gets a job at a local furniture store that is a front for a radical Muslim organization and becomes a principal in the plan to commit a terrorist act. Updike captures brilliantly the coercive tactics of the organization and the young boy's uncertainties about his actions. At the same time, Updike falters in his portrait by depicting Ahmad as a typical American teenager cast into an uncomfortable role of an Islamic terrorist. Even so, Updike's always beautiful prose and his ever-probing imagination trace what happens when worlds collide. All libraries will want to order this. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/06.]--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch. Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is 18 and attends Central High School in the New York metro area working class city of New Prospect, N.J. He is the son of an Egyptian exchange student who married a working-class Irish-American girl and then disappeared when Ahmad was three. Ahmad, disgusted by his mother's inability to get it together, is in the thrall of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a storefront mosque and preaches divine retribution for "devils," including the "Zionist dominated federal government." The list of devils is long: it includes Joryleen Grant, the wayward African-American girl with a heart of gold; Tylenol Jones, a black tough guy with whom Ahmad obliquely competes for Joryleen's attentions (which Ahmad eventually pays for); Jack Levy, a Central High guidance counselor who at 63 has seen enough failure, including his own, to last him a lifetime (and whose Jewishness plays a part in a manner unthinkable before 9/11); Jack's wife, Beth, as ineffectual and overweight (Updike is merciless on this) as she is oblivious; and Teresa Mulloy, a nurse's aide and Sunday painter as desperate for Jack's attention, when he takes on Ahmad's case, as Jack is for hers. Updike has distilled all their flaws to a caustic, crystalline essence; he dwells on their poor bodies and the debased world in which they move unrelentingly, and with a dispassionate cruelty that verges on shocking. Ahmad's revulsion for American culture doesn't seem to displease Updike one iota. But Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame (that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work-all are here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel. (June 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Discursiveness, coincidence and a barely credible surprise ending compromise, but do not critically impair, Updike's intriguing 22nd novel: a scary portrayal of uptight, perpetually imperilled post-9/11 America. It's set in Prospect, N.J., where high-school senior Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy (son of an Egyptian exchange student father and an Irish-American mother)--a self-declared "good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith"--quietly distances himself from the future his education and culture appear to promise. During the summer of 2004, Ahmad rejects the idea of college (despite the promptings of his guidance counselor, "lapsed Jew" Jack Levy), acquires a commercial driver's license and finds employment driving a truck for a Lebanese family (the Chehabs) who own and operate Excellency Home Furnishings. Up until the "mission" for which fast-talking, seemingly Americanized Charlie Chehab has prepared Ahmad is undertaken, Updike does what he does (a) best: paints a densely detailed picture of complacent, overindulgent, morally befuddled urban America--while simultaneously demonstrating persuasive mastery of the scriptures Ahmad worships; and (b) worst: burdens the narrative with urgent sex (Jack's adultery with Ahmad's free-spirited mother Teresa; Ahmad's near-seduction by a black classmate sunk in the slough of godlessness he so despises) and very nearly risible coincidences. Nevertheless, much of the novel works smashingly: Ahmad's impassioned sessions with his slyly seductive Muslim mentor Shaikh Rashid; his tense relationships with schoolmates and muted bonding with his amoral mom; and especially what look to be his final hours, as he drives the furniture truck toward his longed-for destination: paradise. Some readers will call the novel's ending a cop-out; others may acknowledge it as a wry dramatization of the impossibility of predicting where contemporary ethnic and religious conflicts are leading us. However it's read, Updike, approaching his mid-70s, continues to entice, provoke and astonish. Who knows where he'll take us next? Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Updike is never static; over the course of his long career, he has not only mastered various literary forms but also tackled a wide variety of subjects as material for his fiction. His new novel, swift, sinewy, and stylish, represents another big leap. In the hands of a lesser writer, such a risky topic and premise easily could have come across as presumptuous. Ahmad, an 18-year-old high school student, is the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father. He has taken up the Islamic faith of his father so completely that he is obsessed with distancing himself from the unclean infidel, which is how he views the New Jersey community in which he lives. The high-school guidance counselor, who attempts to steer young Ahmad in a direction he feels is more suitable and productive, is a compelling and oddly attractive supporting character, who, as it turns out, plays a vital role in a deadly plot into which Ahmad tumbles like the naive, easily manipulated adolescent he is. This marvelous novel can be accurately labeled as a 9/11 novel, but it deserves also the label of masterpiece for its carefully nuanced building up of the psychology of those who traffic in terrorism. Timely and topical, poised and passionate, it is a high mark in Updike's career. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Along with Philip Roth, Updike remains our modern-day Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his work, he has examined the motivations of scientists (Roger's Book), the angst of aging high school basketball stars (the Rabbit tetralogy), and the sexual peccadilloes of ministers (A Month of Sundays). Here he captures the internal conflicts of an Islamic boy whose sights are set on martyrdom through a terrorist act. Ahmad, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father, joins a local mosque in New Prospect, NJ, at the age of 11. Soon he is entranced by the teachings of Islam, and the local imam takes the boy under his wing. By the time Ahmad is a high school senior, all that he sees around him is godless consumerism. After graduation, he gets a job at a local furniture store that is a front for a radical Muslim organization and becomes a principal in the plan to commit a terrorist act. Updike captures brilliantly the coercive tactics of the organization and the young boy's uncertainties about his actions. At the same time, Updike falters in his portrait by depicting Ahmad as a "typical American teenager" cast into an uncomfortable role of an Islamic terrorist. Even so, Updike's always beautiful prose and his ever-probing imagination trace what happens when worlds collide. All libraries will want to order this. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/06.]-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.