Heightened alert

There are perhaps more factors working against John Updike’s new, carefully crafted, old-school novel than there are working on its behalf.

First, the protagonist, Ahmad Mulloy, is a Muslim of Irish and Egyptian descent, while Updike is a writer who has mostly tread in his familiar waters of white, Protestant upper-crust society. Then there’s the trouble of Updike trying to write convincingly about contemporary adolescence: Ahmad is a high-school senior; Updike, a senior citizen.

But perhaps the greatest danger is that Ahmad, through a slow build, commits himself to an act of terror. To plausibly enter a terrorist’s mind and not trade in the obvious root causes is no easy task. Furthermore, Updike had not written a truly great novel since 1990’s Rabbit at Rest. Despite those odds, he pulls it off.

Deep, naturalistic and psychological, Terrorist centers on Ahmad’s nascent terrorism and the environment that breeds it. As Ahmad puts it: “The world is difficult, because devils are busy in it, confusing things and making the straight crooked.”

Those devils include Joryleen Grant, a pretty black girl who flirts with him while he works his locker combination; Tylenol Jones, her boyfriend who doesn’t appreciate the way he talks to Joryleen; Jack Levy, the aged Jewish guidance counselor who’s mystified by Ahmad’s righteousness; and Hermione Fogel, an underling for the new secretary of Homeland Security.

Not on that list of devils is Imam Shaikh Rashid, Ahmad’s teacher at a local mosque and the prime mover behind Ahmad’s radicalism. It’s his characterization and role in the story that make the novel sing. While none of the characters is painted in broad strokes, it’s the imam’s shadowy presence that’s most delicately crafted. Updike makes him a fierce and commanding figure, yet cunning enough to warp Ahmad’s bravado. The younger radical believes he is more committed than the imam; there’s something wavering about the mentor that bothers the student.

In fact, it’s the imam’s (and Updike’s) greatest trick: convincing the student his commitment doesn’t exist in order to stoke the fire.

Terrorist isn’t flawless. Updike wants to have it both ways with Ahmad: He’s naive enough to not see he’s being manipulated into an act of terror, and yet mature enough to act as a voice box for some of Updike’s elderly scorn for today’s teenagers and popular culture. When Ahmad is punched by Jones, “the watching schoolmates laugh…including several bubbly buxom brown girls, Miss Populars, who [Ahmad] thinks should be kinder. Some day they will be mothers. Some day soon, the little sharameet.”

And then there are misogynist Updike groaners, as when he describes Joryleen’s physicality (“the tops of her breasts push up like great blisters”) or introduces Levy’s wife, Beth, as “a whale of a woman giving off too much heat through her blubber.”

Updike’s naturalistic descriptions go on for pages. But what makes this his best novel in recent memory is that it’s clearly all going somewhere. He’s leading us into not just the psychology of a terrorist, but a cutting cultural critique of the last five years in this country. Updike isn’t sympathetic with any of these characters: the jaded and careless counselor, the Homeland Security stooge, the terrorist.

Normally, such authorial disgust is a turn-off: Why should we care if the writer doesn’t? But maybe it’s because we find Updike is right after all.

John Updike reads from Terrorist (Knopf, $25) at the Printers Row Book Fair Sunday 4.