Fiction: One by one US writers have been attempting to confront the aftermath of September 11th, the day American invincibility died and a new helplessness was born.
Bewilderment, not defiance, has set the tone of these works - it stalks them. Although long-accustomed to waging war abroad, the US was not used to experiencing attack from a seemingly invisible enemy on home soil.
Terrorism is the ultimate sneak violation and it has left its mark on the US and, interestingly, on its fiction as attack from within has become a daily presence, a theme. Several writers have articulated this passive dread, others admit to having become paralysed by it. Finally one major novelist has explored the mentality that creates terrorism in an urgent, powerful and commonsensical narrative that is rich in humanity.
Few would have expected it to have been written by John Updike but it is Updike, the urbane master stylist, whose preferred subject has tended to be human behaviour with particular reference to God and sex, who has written Terrorist, a thriller of sorts, and the most convincing fictional study of terrorism yet achieved by a US writer.
There is no righteousness, no rhetoric, no sentimentality. Updike, stylistically the match of even the great JM Coetzee, is simply too sophisticated to present himself as a patriotic spokesman acting on behalf of the US. It is too easy to forget that although Philip Roth has, since the publication of American Pastoral in 1997, reinvented himself as the chronicler of his country, the far less self-absorbed Updike was always engaged in recording US life as experienced by a cast of convincingly flawed, astutely drawn human beings. The Rabbit quartet, spanning four decades, is as much the story of lower middle-class US life as it is the tragic-comic history of Harry Angstrom.
While Salman Rushdie continues to make fun of Islam, Updike in Terrorist, which is written in a brisk present tense, in five acts, focuses on the type of individual who becomes a terrorist. Most of all, he identifies the core element that creates terrorism - not anger, not hatred, not even fear. It is belief. Belief is the source of terrorism, the perverted inspiration behind the horror.
Belief is also the life force of young Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, who at 18 and about to graduate from his New Jersey high school, is determined to remain sexually pure, honourable and worthy of Allah despite the temptations of the flesh that heave and pulsate about him. The son of an Egyptian father who "decamped" when Ahmad was three and an Irish-American aspiring artist mother who works in a hospital, he is aloof and tormented. Updike carefully moulds the youth and ensures that he speaks in a stiltedly formal English which is polite, careful and alert to threat.
From the opening page Updike sets the scene, the US as it is now, a multicultural society in which older people try to remember what life used to be like while the young swagger with a new menace. Ahmad sighs for a world corrupted by materialism and television. He pities his teachers who display "relief at escaping their students unscathed for another day". He emerges as an individual attempting to live by a disciplined code. While his fellow students are preoccupied by sex, he seeks religious instruction from Shaikh Rashid, his mentor at the local mosque.
Having established young Ahmad's state of mind through prose of courtly grace, Updike then deftly changes tempo by introducing a second major character, Jack Levy, a world-weary, 63-year-old lapsed Jew and high school career guidance counsellor who has taken to waking early each morning "with the taste of dread in his mouth, dry from his breath being dragged through it while he dreamed. His dreams are sinister, soaked through with the misery of the world".
Updike, at 74, is in full flow. On form, no one writes better because few obaserve and listen as closely. He is an artist and more importantly, although the least dogmatic of writers, he has always had something to say.
The early sequences featuring Levy are as perfectly pitched as they are prophetic: "Dread slams shut the door back into sleep, an awareness, deepening each day, that all that is left on Earth for his body to do is to ready itself for death. He has done his courting and mating; he has fathered a child; he has worked to feed that child, little sensitive Mark with his shy cloudy eyes and slippery lower lip, and to furnish him with all the tawdry junk the culture of the time insisted he possess, to blend in with his peers. Now Jack Levy's sole remaining task is to die and thus contribute a little space, a little breathing room, to this over burdened planet. The task hangs in the air just above his insomniac face like a cobweb with a motionless spider in the centre."
Updike moves on to Levy's wife, Beth, a part-time librarian battling her weight and an addiction to afternoon soaps. Jack and Beth are looked at as individuals, then as partners in a marriage in which they are both fellow survivors, and finally as parents of their one child. "He and Beth have their myths between them, and one is that Mark loves them as much as they - helplessly, their nest holding only one egg - love him."
Levy takes notice of Ahmad when the boy arrives for the inevitable career prospects interview and as ever Updike demonstrates his genius for dialogue, particularly in this encounter of opposites. When Ahmad says of God, "He is in me, and at my side", Levy counters, "Good. Good. Glad to hear it. Keep it up. I was exposed to religion a little, my mother would light the Passover candle, but I had this father who was a scoffer, so I followed his example and didn't keep it up."
Early in the narrative Ahmad is approached by the only character in the novel who fails to convince, Joryleen, a young black girl who exploits her sexuality almost as much as it exploits her. She invites the reluctant Ahmad to church, not to pray, but to hear the Baptist songs she loves belting out. The service develops into one of many vivid set pieces. The young girl's wayward attitude to sex is mirrored in the more desperate antics of Ahmad's mother, Teresa, already 40 but not quite defeated, though sufficiently defeated to accept Jack Levy as a lover following their discussion about her son. Their sex scenes are as messily candid, squeamishly funny and as touching as only Updike can render. Where Joryleen reverts to stereotype, Teresa emerges as a strong believable loser who never loses hope.
As the plot surrounding Ahmad's easy slide into violent, suicidal intrigue gathers pace, and with it a new set of religious, cultural, political and counter-terrorist dynamics, Updike avoids every cliché, embraces coincidence with the gusto of Dickens and sustains the tension without losing sight of his characters. Terrorist presents a new Updike whose strength lies in being able to conjour up all his familiar flair.
Paul Auster closed a recent novel, The Brooklyn Follies, just as the air attacks were about to begin; Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days approached the 9/11 aftermath with allegorical zeal; young pretender Jonathan Safran Foer's overrated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close attempted to confront it head on and missed, while veteran short story writer Deborah Eisenberg's new collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, shudders with awareness. Yet it is Updike, the God-fearing, all-seeing observer of humanity at work and at play, who has captured the essence of the moment as well as the weight of human history in a brave, living and concerned novel that also ranks among his inimitable best.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
• Terrorist By John Updike Hamish Hamilton, 310pp. £17.99
