John Updike has always been regarded as a highly accomplished writer, yet this particular work is truly an embarrassment.

It is not only a melodramatic read, but the characters, with the exception of Ahmad, are nothing but detestable caricatures. They seem to be the very stereotypes that a klansman might envision a non-WASP to be. Even Ahmad, who is a Jersey native with an Irish mother, speaks like a devotee of Kayyam. The glib references to Islam and Islamist rationale, the 'ottoman' money smuggling operation, and the woman who feels compelled to call and tell her sister all the nation's terror secrets are so artlessly presented that they would be laughable if they weren't so poorly executed.

However, it is Updike's attitude towards blacks that truly turns the characters from badly drawn caricatures into racist cartoons. A black preacher delivering a sketch that harks back to the dark days of blackface minstrelsy, and a teenage girl with a boyfriend pimp named, unfortunately, Tylenol Jones. The introduction of this disgraceful character and the torrid way in which Ahmad and Tylenol cross paths is enough to make one grind their teeth. As an added bonus, there is the Trinidadian teacher who not only thinks that J-Lo is a 'him', but also drops the odd'mon' in conversation. It's truly astonishing.

Updike is indeed a master essayist, and his previous novels are truly fantastic. This, however, is a significant blip on an otherwise untarnished trajectory. Be warned, this book is so bad that it makes one question whether his earlier works were perhaps not as good as they seemed. It is best to avoid this book.

What is it like inside the mind of a terrorist? How can someone persuade himself that violence against the innocent is justifiable? What thoughts does a terrorist harbor that might explain a personal death wish?

Read page 3: “Devils Ahmad thinks … “

Is Ahmad a terrorist? Could he potentially become one? Could he be swayed to act violently against those he deems as devils, infidels, or those who do not follow the Straight Path?

A few individuals know Ahmad. His mother recalls her short-lived affair with an Egyptian college student. Joryleen Grant, a classmate, perceives Ahmad's complex feelings towards her, a combination of attraction and disgust. Jack Levi, the guidance counselor, sees Ahmad, but perhaps it is already too late.

We are left to wonder about the inner turmoil and potential radicalization that Ahmad might be experiencing. The question of whether he will succumb to the path of terrorism looms large, and the few people who know him may hold the key to understanding his state of mind and potentially preventing a tragic outcome.

DNF around 40 percent. My first ever DNF

In some ways, Updike has crafted a truly remarkable book. It is not only meticulously researched, offering profound insights that make one stop and think, but it also functions as a perfectly paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller in its own right.

The number of characters is just right, each one complex, imperfect, and exquisitely drawn. On numerous occasions, I had to forcibly remind myself that this book is a work of fiction and should be regarded as such, which I take as a testament to the quality of the research and writing.

However, be forewarned that the book maintains a consistently negative, cynical, and depressing tone throughout. There is a cat in the story, and even it is depicted as being depressed and discontented with Western society, much like all the characters, including the so-called "good guys." This makes for difficult reading (it's almost like "Welcome to Dick Cheney's view of the world"), but I believe it is essential to convince the reader of the deep-seated conviction that the terrorist in the title feels compelled to carry out his plans. Everywhere he looks, he finds reasons to loathe America and its culture, and if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit to those flaws.

As you read this book, you simply have to keep reminding yourself that there is also a great deal of good.

You can only call this book bewilderingly sexist.

It is built on a whole range of flawed racial, religious and gender stereotypes.

The writing is lazy and unimaginative, lacking in any real depth or creativity.

It's the kind of book that you keep hoping will improve as you read on, but unfortunately, it never does.

You find yourself constantly waiting for something interesting or engaging to happen, but it just doesn't materialize.

In the end, you're left feeling disappointed and frustrated, wondering why you bothered to pick up the book in the first place.

So, my advice is to just give up on this book and move on to something else that is more worthwhile and enjoyable to read.

Review previously published at http://www.webdelsol.com/The_Potomac/...

E.M. Forster defines the novel as a prose fiction of more than 50,000 words. He convincingly argues that the essential ingredients of a novel are the obvious three: story, plot, and characters. Besides these, the best novels are enhanced with appropriate seasonings of rhythm (motifs repeated at perfect intervals), fantasy (which can be steeped in rationality and often confused with reality), and prophecy (only the best books manage this feat: the original proclamation of something universally human).

If Forster's guidelines had been in Updike's mind, he might not have written Terrorist as he did. Perhaps he wouldn't have written it at all. Updike is known for exploring suburban existential dilemmas. His works are filled with the adulterous and dog-walking inertia among the ennui-ridden intelligentsia of the US northeastern seaboard. The "foreign work" in his twenty-two-novel career is limited to The Coup (1978) and Brazil (1994). Besides novels, his oeuvre includes books of poems, essays, children's fantasy, a play, and a memoir. He is widely recognized as a champion of American middle- and upper-class values.

When it was announced that the American master would write a book titled Terrorist, expectations were high. However, there were skeptics who doubted Updike could do it. They were right. John Updike should not have written this book. It's not because it derides extremist factions within Islam (though it does so subtly and overtly, albeit artlessly), which many reviewers overlooked. It's not because he didn't consider the integration of first-generation Muslim Americans. It's not because writers shouldn't experiment. The reason is simply that Terrorist is a badly written book.

Consider the story. Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy is the son of an Irish-American woman and an Egyptian exchange student who left when he was three. At the start, Ahmad is about to graduate from high school in New Prospect, New Jersey. He then goes to work for a Lebanese immigrant family. A bomb plot surfaces, and Ahmad finds himself driving the rigged truck.

The plot, the second most important element of a novel, is supposed to answer the reader's "Why?" Updike doesn't do well here. The narrator's attempts at omniscience are limp and bitter. Ahmad has a monotonous identity and a childlike peevishness that leads him to volunteer for the bombing mission. It's as if Updike took a CNN sketch of a terrorist and added inadaptable muscle and bone. The result is an android-like character with unreasonable menace.

Never balanced, Terrorist teeters over a void and repeatedly fails to understand Ahmad. It may be too late for the septuagenarian Updike to realize Ahmad's story or angst. The hollow shell that Ahmad becomes discredits Updike. However, in passages not related to Ahmad or only peripherally connected, Updike shows his talent. His commentary on suburban culture is authoritative. But Ahmad's language is awkward, and his global political views are blanket statements.

Other characters include Ahmad's mother, guidance counselor, love-interest, and the Lebanese furniture businessman's son. These characters are flat and serve as microphones of American secularity. At the other end of the tug-of-war is the Quranic instructor and local mosque's imam, who is portrayed as a mysterious entity.

Updike's research is impeccable. The narrator is well-versed in the Quran's structure and quotes it frequently. However, Updike damages the narrative by overusing scriptural quotes in a novel promoting secular philosophy. The quotes also mainly present the punitive image of the Islamic God. Additionally, the two epigraphs are unsuitable, and the inconsistencies and shallowness of the book prevent a reread and cast a shadow over Updike's motives.

In conclusion, Terrorist is a trite work that John Updike should not have written, even if he was only trying to meet the minimum criterion of a novel: 50,000 words of prose fiction.

Will he or won’t he? In this post-9/11 coming of age tale, Ahmad Mulloy-Ashmawy, a high school senior, is firmly convinced that the culture he lives in is thoroughly unclean. As the child of an Irish-American mother and a long-departed Egyptian father, he strongly identifies with his Arabic side. By his own volition, he began Islamic studies at the tender age of 11. Under the guidance of a fundamentalist imam, he has wholeheartedly dedicated his life to Islam, scornfully rejecting the temptations of the flesh. Or perhaps it is just a mask for his own insecurities? While passionately expounding on the closeness he feels to Allah, doubts still manage to creep in. He experiences the same desires that we all do.

Jake, a 60ish guidance counselor at Ahmad’s school, recognizes Ahmad’s intellectual capacity and encourages him to consider college. However, the imam has persuaded Ahmad to take up truck-driving instead, placing him with a Lebanese-run furniture company. There, Ahmad befriends Charlie, who both challenges his asceticism and encourages its excesses. Charlie even goes so far as to hire Joryleen Grant for Ahmad, a girl he had been friends with at school. Charlie leads Ahmad into a dangerous plot.

Subsidiary characters include the homeland security secretary, his assistant, her sister who happens to be Jack’s wife, and Ahmad’s mother, a part-time artist who has never been able to maintain any of her numerous relationships.

What do you believe in? What is truly worth dying for? Is that all there is? Updike’s world is a grimy one, incredibly real-seeming, a dark place where the innocent, or nearly innocent, are led into harm’s way by the unscrupulous. It is a world where no bright future awaits, a world rife with hypocrisy. Ahmad is a contemporary Holden Caulfield, unprepared to accept the world as it is and repulsed by its omnipresent dark sides. Will he mature quickly enough to prevent his own destruction?

Fatherhood also plays a significant role here. Ahmad’s father abandoned him when he was just three. He sought a replacement in Shaikh Rashid, with his mother’s approval, and now Jack attempts to offer him parental-like guidance.

Updike masterfully captures the rage of the outsider. It is easy to understand how one could view today’s world as corrupt and far from holy, and from there, it is not a large step to want to see that society harmed. Add in the anti-rational forces of religion and adolescence, and the result is powerful and dangerous. The final scene is a nail-biting one. Will he or won’t he?

There are other issues not addressed here, which influence how Updike views the east-west conflict. The focus is almost entirely on the unclean nature of western culture, with only a passing mention of US actions in the world. Osama did not carry out his deeds because we are pigs. He did it because we occupied Saudi Arabia and blindly support whatever Israel desires. Thus, Updike, with this choice of focus, defines the conflict as being based on values and having nothing to do with actions. In the absence of significant attacks on his person or religion clearly spelled out in the story, it is unclear how Ahmad could shift from a reasonable anger to a homicidal rage.

Is Ahmad better off for having something to believe in than Jack, who was raised an atheist? Charlie’s religion seems to be the American Dream. Is Joryleen allowing herself to be used by the thuggish Tylenol more or less manipulated than Ahmad is by the Shaikh? Can the Homeland Security head really be such a simpleton? One would never suspect that our government is staging a full-court press against the constitution.

Myeh.

It was written in 2006, and I do acknowledge that it was a different time. However, this particular piece felt a bit like profiling to me.

It didn't seem to do a great job of comprehensively explaining how radicalization occurs.

In general, Ahmed is a somewhat relatable character. But in this specific plot, the character isn't very believable.

Overall, it isn't great when it comes to addressing islamophobia or radicalization in a way that can educate anyone or contribute to a helpful and meaningful dialogue on these important topics.

This is indeed a rather vague review, but basically, it's not a great piece in my opinion.

It fails to effectively convey the complex issues related to radicalization and islamophobia, and the character and plot don't add much value to the discussion.

Perhaps with a more in-depth exploration and a more believable portrayal, it could have been a more impactful work.

But as it stands, it falls short in several aspects.

Disclaimer: I had to read this for a class about Islamophobia.

The text presents a rather complex assessment of a literary work. On one hand, it acknowledges that the descriptive passages manage to create a somewhat gripping storyline, which salvages a 2-star rating. It also evokes a minimal amount of sympathy for the protagonist, although empathy is lacking as the character is considered completely unrelatable and unbelievable.

However, the blatant undercurrent of sexism and racism makes the work near unreadable at times. The author feels sorry for all the female characters as they are given a poor characterization by Updike. The plot is criticized for being completely predictable and disgustingly cliché, especially in the build-up towards the end.

There is one aspect that the author liked in theory, which is the interplay between the viewpoints of the two opposing protagonists, Ahmad and Jack, whose views are supposedly not so far from one another. But this was ruined by being overly labored, resulting in a monotonous tone throughout as the distinctions in narrative tone are pretty much completely erased or blended. Overall, the work has its flaws and fails to fully engage the reader on multiple levels.

This book has remained with me for months after I finished reading it.

I truly relished Updike's writing style. His use of precise language was remarkable, allowing him to paint vivid details that brought the story to life.

Moreover, it made me think deeply about faith. As someone who has never adhered to a particular religion, I found myself considering the intense need one might feel to be correct about a specific belief, even in the face of doubts.

Virtue, righteousness, and a certain lack of flexibility - these are all aspects that come into play when discussing faith and belief systems.

Do these qualities enhance or hinder one's spiritual journey? It's a question that lingers in my mind as I continue to reflect on the themes presented in the book.

Overall, this reading experience has been both thought-provoking and enriching, leaving a lasting impression on me.

I walked into this expecting not to like it. Updike is an author I feel quite comfortable referring to pejoratively as an “old white guy.” This label comes with a matrix of assumptions about his ability to write non-male, non-white, non-old characters with the appropriate sensitivity, intelligence, and authority. Now, Updike is indeed an old white guy. However, this book, it turns out, is really good, in part because my expectations weren’t met.

Terrorist is about Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy, a half-Irish, half-Egyptian American teenager. At the age of eleven, he decides to embrace his father’s cultural faith and become a Muslim. From then on, he is led by his imam, Shaikh Rashid, to an increasingly extreme understanding of Islam. By the time Ahmad is a senior in high school, when the novel truly begins, he is unable to think outside the strict limitations of Wahhabi dogma. He regularly says things like “There is no end of devilish contortions once human beings feel free to compete with God and to create themselves.” He chooses to take a job as a truck driver for a local furniture business instead of going to college, fearing that his faith will be weakened after graduation.

This job, arranged by Rashid, brings Ahmad into contact with Charlie Chehab. Chehab teaches Ahmad to drive the truck and, through a series of conversations on the road, determines whether Ahmad is ready to die for his faith. Feeling pressured to prove the purity of his convictions to both Charlie and Rashid, Ahmad agrees to drive a truck filled with a ton of explosive material into the Lincoln Tunnel (the novel is set in New Jersey) during Monday rush hour and blow it up. So the tension builds to the grand dénouement.

When Ahmad avoids getting caught by the feds on his way to pick up the truck, picks up the truck, and heads toward the highway, he sees his high school guidance counselor, Jack Levy, flagging him down. He picks up Levy, and Levy, whose sister-in-law is the undersecretary of Homeland Security, explains to Ahmad that he has been set up by Charlie, an undercover informant, to take the fall for a sting operation that was never supposed to get this far. Ahmad, now in the Tunnel at the point where he is supposed to press the ignition button, can’t do it. He and Levy, now in Manhattan, turn around and go home.

Okay, so this certainly has the smell of a boiling pot about it, and the ending is, well, messy (the guidance counselor? Really, John?). But still, Terrorist is doing some cool things. More than anything else, the novel (I know this is cheesy) is about the need we have for guidance. Ahmad’s father leaves his young family when Ahmad is only three. His (single) mother is a nurse who works crazy hours. Ahmad is an only child. The structure that Ahmad gets from Islam is what other kids in the book get from sports, or gangs, or, in at least one case, the Church choir. These same kids that Jack Levy laments for being undisciplined and undisciplinable actually, as all the parenting books tell us, crave structure and will take it where they can find it, even if it’s outside of the home (as it often is).

What Updike manages to do is present the phenomenon of terrorism as a systemic problem born from, as he frames it, children who grow up without parents. This, of course, is not to say that all parentless children become terrorists, or that one needs biological parents to avoid becoming a terrorist, or anything like that. What I mean here is that one of the necessary conditions for producing what we call terrorism is the absence of guidance from adults without ulterior motives (in other words, “parents,” a term I’m using loosely here).

To his credit, and this is one of those expectations that Updike didn’t meet that made this book so good, he isn’t shy about providing answers for the causes of this global parentlessness. He regularly refers to the disastrous ramifications of perpetual war and late-stage capitalism throughout. Ahmad, finally, is a stand-in for cultures that are forced to reach for the structure and self-worth provided by the cultural equivalent of caring parents, what we might call disinterested institutions and what in the novel is presented (again, cheesily) as the role of the guidance counselor.

The uncomfortable conclusion I’m forced to draw from all this is that in a world where there are no truly disinterested institutions (Levy, the sort-of hero, has an affair with Ahmad’s mom, by the way), where we’re all the children of bad parents, we’re also all, at least implicitly, terrorists. We can criticize Updike for a contrived plot, but his message has weight.

A teenage punk, driven by an aimless longing to belong, perilously teeters on the brink of embracing the life of a domestic terrorist. However, at the eleventh hour, his kind-hearted high school guidance counselor jolts him out of this dangerous trajectory by gently revealing a rather astonishing truth – that the kid's mother is a big fat hoe.

Huh?

John Updike's attempt at character creation falls flat as he fails to craft a single likable protagonist or even a memorable antagonist. He condescends to everyone in the story, be it women, ethnic groups, or non-whites, all the while feigning a false sense of good-will while seething with self-pity and resentment. Moreover, his desperate sentimentality about the past is palpable. While many talk of dying with dignity, Updike seems to insist on dying on his knees, idolizing the false gods of his youth and middle age, having learned precious little and forgotten nothing.

One can argue that America is a great nation and the terrorists are in the wrong. But if one's perception of America is limited to obese housewives lounging around, munching on cookies and tuning into soap operas, whose side is one truly on? If anyone is to safeguard American values from the so-called Muslim hordes, it surely shouldn't be a man like John Updike, who harbored as much hatred for America as any terrorist.

In other words, a terrorist in Afghanistan (or perhaps it was Iraq) once declared that US troops couldn't vanquish his ilk because, "you love life. We love death." The irony lies in the fact that Updike himself loves death as much as any terrorist. He is unable to make a case for life because the majority of his white, middle-class characters secretly loathe their own lives and yearn for death.