Updike's other America

John Updike's new novel tells the story of an 18-year-old New Jersey high-school student who believes that his faith in Islam is threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in a slumping, suburban factory-town in America. Reviewed by Robert Stone

Terrorist by John Updike. Alfred A Knopf, €20

For 50 years John Updike has been examining America in his fiction and essays, reflecting upon its art and history, documenting its volatile progressions. In their longings, in their occasional self-discoveries and more usually in their self-deceptions, the characters in his novels and stories have demonstrated the desperation with which people in America have sought to find some equilibrium against the background of headlong change.

Updike's work, viewed in now old-fashioned sociopolitical terms, examines our struggle to maintain a viable centre for our inner life while enduring the most revolutionary force in history – American capitalism.

One of the most interesting things about this book is its convergence of imagined views about the way America is and the way it appears. The views are, variously, those of an American high-school boy – half-Irish, half-Egyptian – who is intoxicated by Islam; an elderly Lebanese immigrant; that immigrant's American-born son; and an ambiguous Yemeni imam who is the high-school boy's religious teacher.

In one scene, the newly graduated boy and his Lebanese-American boss are talking about American history as they drive past some of the battlefields of the American Revolution. The youth, Ahmad Mulloy, expresses a plaintive regret that the Americans won. If the colonies had been restored to their British obedience, he says, the place might have evolved into "a kind of Canada, a peaceable and sensible country, though infidel".

"Dream on," says the boss, who is himself a figure of conflict and intrigue. "There's too much energy here for peace and sensible."

This parable of our 21st-century condition unfolds in northern New Jersey, that familiar landscape of marshland and industrial slough, supporting the decaying remnants of once-prospering immigrant-energised towns. Though it marks the opposite approach to the proud towers of Manhattan, much of it might have served F Scott Fitzgerald as a model for the valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby where, from a billboard on the eastern margin of the city, the unseeing eyes of the optician TJ Eckleburg overlooked the desperate comings and goings of a deluded America 80 years ago.

But the great informing image in the sky over Jersey, still so conjurable in memory as to serve as a totem, is the tower of smoke twisting skyward, replacing the elongated dominoes that had lorded like idols over the plain. On 11 September 2001 all eyes turned heavenward there, and hundreds of the sons and daughters of New Jersey died. New York, like the city of Ad in the Koran, was struck for its wealth and pride.

The invisible but somehow immanent presence of 9/11's inferno over New Jersey serves to remind us that Updike, whose work has never departed too far from his religious concerns, has written about apocalypse before. In his haunting but unresolved novel Toward the End of Time (1997), he presents a war and crime-ravaged terminal America, its sky blighted by a monstrous second moon – he calls it a torus – that looms over the land as a mockery of grace. The America in which this new story unfolds is not so freakish or surreal, but its moral exhaustion and reprobation are nearly as intense.

Rather than the metaphysical forces of that novel, an assembly of religiously driven immigrants come to preside in judgement, certain in their own convictions, which they believe equip them to see through the pretensions of their adopted country and set it to rights by slaughter. Terrorist is not mixed with symbolist-surrealism as Toward the End of Time was. Its characters inhabit a real New Jersey, for the most part, and they are credible individuals.

Ahmad's mother, Terry, is a would-be artist, abandoned by her Egyptian husband and employed as a nurse's aide in a local hospital. Overworked and unhappy in love, she has had little time for her highly intelligent, sensitive son who, in the throes of teendom, rejects her. The one person who takes an interest in young Ahmad is his high-school counsellor, Jack Levy, who visits Ahmad's house after-hours with a stack of college catalogues. Maybe it's a little hard to believe that weary, burned-out Jack, on the edge of retirement, would put so much effort into the fortunes of this prickly adolescent. Maybe he's a mite too dedicated to guidance counselling to be credible – but nonetheless Updike makes him believable at the outset. Before too long a romance develops between the unhappily married Levy and Terry Mulloy. For Jack it's an unexpected late-life comfort; for wary, cynical Terry it's a limited engagement.

Meanwhile, the ferret-like imam, Shaikh Rashid, has been directing Ahmad's vocational path toward, of all things, truck driving.

He also answers the boy's questions about faith in a casuistic fashion that bothers young Ahmad, a religiously gifted person whose faith partakes of a Sufi-like mysticism. Ahmad's religious instruction provides the opportunity for some long discourses on Islam in the modern world, one of the didactic areas of the novel that some readers may not have much patience for. But these dialogues, along with the reflections they provoke in Ahmad, serve Updike's intentions – the examination of contemporary America exposed to the passions in the non-American world.

Updike can clearly imagine his way into the moralizing resentments this country brings forth in the hearts of those who are at once underprivileged and confidently traditional. On the other hand, this story is no supine catalogue of self-recrimination. Its tensions are well-calibrated and the points of view clearly and at times ironically presented.

The last part of the novel is suspenseful. It brings together a serviceable plot, which leans a little heavily on coincidental connections, a questionable provocation and some broadly motivated acts of heroism. It seems meant as a fable, and any good fable requires some derring-do. The most satisfactory elements in Terrorist are those that remind us that no amount of special pleading can set us free of history, no matter how oblivious and unresponsive to it we may be. And that history, in disposing of empires, admits of no innocents and spares no one.

© 2006 The New York Times