Terrorist
Sunday, July 15th, 2007 @ 04:49
by John Updike (2006)
Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is the son of an Irish-American mother, Teresa Mulloy, and an Egyptian father, Omar Ashmawy, who disappeared when Ahmad was three. Taken under the strict guidance of Shaik Rashid when he was eleven where he begins his bi-weekly Qur’an and Arabic lessons, Ahmad moves through the post-9/11 “New Prospect” in New Jersey with the (typical) revulsion for the materialistic, hedonistic “Americanism”.
Devoted to the “Straight Path” of his faith, Ahmad follows the advise of Shaik Rashid to become a truck driver for a Lebanese family after graduation despite the insistence of his Jewish counsellor, Jacob Levy. While Jack’s wife, the overweight Beth, is the sister of the “Undersecretary of Women’s Purses” who works for the Secretary for Homeland Security. Already one can detects the possible plot brewing from the description of the characters.
The premise of the book, the post-9/11 world, is one that unfortunately has been discussed to death that writing a novel on it runs the risk of banality and superficiality (if not “politically raising a few eyebrows”). The characters in the novel seem rather like cardboard-cutouts, with dialogues and ruminations typical of “Say No to War against Terror” and other college-wall dissenting posters; the plot a blip; the suburban testosterone too common if not superficially ostentatious in this subject matter. (Of course, there’s a chance that it’s all a deliberate jab at the banality of it all, but amidst the myriad of platitude on this topic it just isn’t effective.) A pity, considering the viewpoints in this novel, i.e. that of the “perpetrator”, has so many interesting potentials.
