WITH its zealous teenage narrator and topical theme, Terrorist may be John Updike's most fiery f... Updike ups the ante on terr
Not since 1978's The Coup has Updike felt so overtly political; not since 1971's Rabbit Redux has he been so steeped in the headlines of the day.
Updike's "hero" is Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an Arab-American high school student with dark thoughts. Although his mother is American and he was raised there, Ahmad is convinced that impure America is trying to besmirch his Islamic faith.
When Ahmad was three, his father, an Egyptian exchange student, abandoned the family. Ahmad's mother, a "blithely faithless" Irish-American, is a nurse's aide who paints and designs jewellery.
As he "tasted American plenty by licking its underside" in the racially mixed working-class neighbourhood of New Prospect, New Jersey, Ahmad, a bright and lonely kid, grew hungry for something more.
Apparently, Updike agrees that American culture provides "too many paths, too much selling of useless things" – that freedom without purpose "becomes a kind of prison".
Another bracing force for the book is its setting. While Updike has set many of his books in bucolic Pennsylvania or in the Boston suburbs, Terrorist unfolds in urban New Prospect, New Jersey.
"The way everything is kind of compressed, and you have to deal with neighbours you don't much like. When I think of New Jersey, I think of it as a melting pot.
"My own experience of a melting pot is that no matter how liberal and friendly you feel towards people of different colours and cultural priorities, that it is something you're aware of.
"I don't think you can portray America without dealing with the fact that it's a mixture of races and ideas. This is a place where you're supposed to put up with people who don't agree with you."
"It is the world we are now living in," he said. "It's still in our headlines, with the Iraq conflict, plus the incidents of terrorism outside this country – the train and bus bombings in London and Madrid . . .
"It's the number one issue for the United States of America as it faces outward – how we're going to deal with militant Islam and the Arab world.
"We've been spared, whether through Bush's brilliance or dumb luck or whatever, a repeat of September 11 – but it could happen any moment, I'm afraid."
Updike laughs at – and agrees with – a list of potential groups the novel might offend: Arabs, blacks, guidance counsellors, high school students, Jews, ministers, obese people, New Jersey residents and the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.
And as always with Updike, one must consider the erotic content. Terrorist features some heavy sexual tension between Ahmad and Joryleen, a fellow student who is Christian but not exactly innocent.
Across his 47-year career as a novelist, Updike has joined, then sundered, quite a few couples, and some of those scenes have been very brutal, moving well beyond the shock factor.
Even by his standards, though, the falling-out between Jack and Teresa is vicious, more calculated in its delivery than Updike has produced in the past.
"These are slightly tougher people," Updike says, "northern New Jerseyites rather than Massachusetts suburbanites, so I felt they'd use rougher language."
At the end of all the convoluted plotting, Teresa uses a harsh ethnic epithet to provoke Jack's ire, striking out at a man who cannot be a real part of her life simply because he is, as Updike says, "too old, too married and too tired".
Updike writes here in the third person, but the viewpoint frequently belongs to the tormented young man. It reminds one of the author's four novels of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, in which Updike enjoyed the god's-eye freedom the third person allows while still staying close to Rabbit's perspective on things.
"There are ways in which there is a cousinly resemblance," Updike says of Rabbit and Ahmad. "They're both sort of loners – discontented loners.
Updike also has had, for many years, another kind of faith: the belief in his ability to produce more books. Born in 1932, the 74-year-old author has, at this writing, turned out 22 novels, 15 short-story collections, eight books of essays and criticism, seven volumes of poetry, five children's titles, a play and a memoir.
Since he made his debut with The Carpentered Hen in 1958, he has published a book every year except 1961, 1967, 1973, 1980 and 1995. Yes, he has another in the works, this time a ninth book of criticism along the lines of Odd Jobs and More Matter.
He has said more than once that he feels more at ease, less anxious, if he always has something going. "It's like a bicycle. You're afraid if you don't always have a book in the works, you'll forget how to turn the pedals."
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