Updike’s new novel comes five years after 9/11 and takes those events as the starting points for a discussion of what fanaticism and terrorism mean. Rather than looking at terrorists as coming from outside the US, he investigates how domestic terrorists might think and why they would hate US culture and society. It is an ambitious and difficult project that Updike has begun, and one that is at nature very controversial.
What is probably best about the novel is the fact that it tries hard not to reduce the problematics it investigates and that it never dehumanizes those who would easily be categorized as extremists. The novel follows two people: Ahmad and Jack. Ahmad is a young Arab-American who has become a Muslim due to his dissatisfaction with the US and his Christian mother, who was left by Ahmad’s Muslim father. Jack is an older Jew who has never been religious, and works as a guidance counsellor at the high school which Ahamd attends.
Their lives become intertwined as Jack takes an interest in Ahmad, because Ahmad - though intelligent - does not wish to go to college, because his imam claims Western culture to be corrupt and attending college would only lessen Islam’s place in Ahmad’s life.
The novel emphazises the similarity between Ahmad and Jack; both are disillusioned by the current state of US culture, and for much the same reasons. Consumerism, lack of moral behavior and indifference toward others are by both regarded as the failure of society. If there is any difference in the portrayal of the two, it is that Ahmad is much more passionate than Jack, who has resigned to his bleak life with a fat wife he no longer loves. Ahmad is portrayed more positively, taking a stance against society in choosing to be a Muslim and denouncing the lax behavior he sees around him.
The best image in the novel of US culture’s almost complete moral disintegration is Joryleen, a love interest of Ahmad’s, who is first presented as a typical teenage girl, singing at Church every Sunday. Much later Ahmad meets her again, this time as a whore sold by her boyfriend/pimp “until they get on their feet”. She claims she can stop anytime, but it is clear that she has no choice and can never stop.
Generally, American moral behavior is portrayed as faulty, such as when Jack cheats on his wife with Ahmad’s mother or when Jack allows his wife to go on a life-threatening diet. The flipside of this - and I do believe it is the flipside - is the Muslim community Ahmad is drawn to, where people help him, care for him more than his own mother does, and provide him with the job he wants and the teachings he is so deeply interested in.
On the other hand, the Muslim community is not glorified, but is itself deeply problematic, insular and demanding. While the US culture is seen as the freedom to do nothing, and nothing there has any value, the Muslim community provides purpose but at a cost. The purpose becomes clearer as the novel progresses (although we already know what it is, because of the novel’s title), and attempts to show how manipulation might work within extremist circles.
Ahmad is portrayed as surly and dissatisfied, but at heart a boy who wishes to do the right thing. His conversion into a suicide bomber - although perhaps overly quick and a bit predictable - is frightening becuase his teachers and friends say so little, yet he is goaded into this sacrifice.
The book ends, as it must I think, unresolved. Ahmad is dissuaded by Jack and does not blow up the bomb, yet he does so only by losing his faith, and it is insinuated that Ahmad will now be swallowed up by the society around him, killing him in a different, more spiritual, manner. There is no easy answer from the book, and providing one would have been wrong. The situation is far too complex for easy answers, and is not divided into easy lines of them and us. The book’s strength lies in creating believable - even likeable - characters, and showing that there are many similarities between dissatisfied Americans and Muslims and that it is often the same things that they are dissatisfied with. The weakness of the book is the almost clichéd representation of US culture as a consumerist wasteland - the choice between liking US or not becomes too one-sided and not sufficiently problematic.
If there is a distinct political message in the book, it comes from one of Ahmad’s friends, Charlie, who says that being the sole superpower brings responsibility and that those who hold power over others must necessarily be careful how they use it. While a sympathetic point of view, it again seems to simple for me. Surely few people believe that they exercise their power without caution or without consideration for the greater good. Reducing discussions of right or wrong choices to such a simplistic dichotomy undermines the novel’s intention of complex portrayal of difficult choices.
