John Updike's long-drawn perspective on our cultural slide since the 60s is - after his still painterly prose (he's 74) - the most inspiring thing about
Terrorist, his 22nd novel. He's a prosecutor as man-of-letters. At "Central High School" in "New Prospect, N.J.", hard by the Lincoln Tunnel, a kind of reinforced concrete trachea sloping into the guts of the city across the Hudson, "the girls sway and sneer ... exposing their bare bellies adorned with shiny navel studs and low-down purple tattoos [that ask]
What else is there to see? ... Boys strut and saunter ... [looking] dead-eyed, indicating with killer gestures and scornful laughs that this world is all there is - a noisy varnished hall lined with metal lockers [ending at] a blank wall desecrated with graffiti and roller-painted so often it [seems] to be coming closer ... The teachers, weak Christians and non-observant Jews, make a show of teaching virtue and righteous self-restraint, but their shifty eyes betray their lack of belief ..."
Yet the "religious" indictment is more than character development for Ahmad Mulloy, half Arab, half Irish,
Terrorist's protagonist. He's a strangely mild, considerate fellow for a guy willing to drive a truckload of 4000 kilos of ammonium nitrate ( twice what McVeigh brought against the federal building in Oklahoma), down into the Lincoln Tunnel. To blow cracks in the concrete loose enough to drown the infidel traffic inside --
Rabbit as Raghead. Updike's eternal fictive teenager has matured into a macho sensitive, tying Manhattan and New Jersey into gasping knots to equal the 9/11 disaster -- mashed cars of human tuna floating to the oily surface - but he's still a nice kid from Shillington, Pa.. Like Rabbit Angstrom was. Like Henry Bech. Like the silvered lifeguard of
Pigeon Feathers. Updike's strange yearning for the values of the past (literate sentences, unlike McInerny's or Oprah's!), a sensuality free of the mangles of corrupt religion , but still insisting on clean sheets and good manners, persists in spite of everything.
An Updike prosecution: Houses have been replaced by "housing". Compressed, squeezed closer together by rising land costs & subdivision. No more back and side yards, flowering trees,
vegetable gardens, clotheslines, swings ... Instead, "a few scruffy bushes fight for carbon dioxide and damp soil between concrete walks and asphalt parking spaces stolen from what had been generous margins of grass.
"The needs of the automobile have proved decisive" ...
Just look at Iraq. Bloody oil. A pornographic "democracy" scenario spun by old man Cheney & pinch-face Rumsfeld, based on Paul Wolfowitz's ancient "Project for a New American Century" manifesto (when Wolfo was defense undersecretary for George Herbert Walker Bush). "The New World Order" as they called it then - except that in '92, there were still some tough liberals in the press, so that when Wolfowitz's lupine bile leaked to the
Post and
Times, it caused a public rash that had to be cosmeticized ... But only for a while, to wait behind Clinton's doll-bottomed presidential chair for Monica to finish her cigar, and for Bush Jr. to reclaim D.C. for Kennebunkport and Texas ... Seen this way, 9/11 was a God-given photo op, and Wolfo, long before he fled to the World Bank for safety, was rampant again, articulating Dubya's whole foreign policy:
'Goddamnit it, son, the U.S. is importing 60% of our fossil fuel, for Chrissake! In five years, it'll be 65%! In the 70s, it was 30%! We got to get Iraq, or Uzbekistan or Kazakistan! We need 'em! It's in the goddamned national interest!'
The voice of the old money curled through Halliburton's aluminum heart, and the sons of the new money, good-looking kids from Harvard Business and the Wharton School, newly minted Republicans, were flown over to explain to the Interim Iraq Government squares in Baghdad: "The purpose of a political party is to channel power ..."
Meanwhile, in New Prospect, N.J., in the detritus of Martin Luther Jr.'s dream, founded 200 years ago by bankers, knitting mill operators, leatherworks entrepreneurs, factory owners who produced locomotives and then horseless carriages, commerce has been downsized to pizza and chili parlors, garish junk-food emporiums with golden arches, state lotto shops, stolen cigarette drops, abandoned movie theaters where you can cop monster, stepped-on crack or horse, tranny blowjobs, HIV and antibiotic-resistant syphilis. Joryleen Grant, a hot senior at the high school, who sings in a "holiness" choir and digs on Ahmad's crisp white shirts and smoky jeans, turns out to be hooking casually for her boyfriend, Tylenol - "He always gots headaches so his moms called him that" -- and shows up as a present for Ahmad when his Lebanese furniture delivery boss Charlie, who looks like the actor Fred Ward, is priming him for his mission into the Tunnel.
But the kid is so pure, he only lets her dry-hump him, and tries to turn her onto the Straight Path:
'fi amadinmumaddada, naru l-lahi l-muqada' ... urging her off the game. She patiently explains that she loves Tylenol: "He's my man. Without me, he doesn't have much. He'd be pathetic, and maybe I love him too much for him to know that. For a black man grown up poor, having a woman to peddle around is no disgrace - it's a way to prove your manhood." She sighs: "You don't know much yet about love."
He's learning fast, though. Ahmad's guidance counselor, Jack Levy, a Walter Mathau romantic cynic, upset because his brightest student has opted to be a truck driver, comes over to Ahmad's two rooms to talk to his mom. Terry is a nurse's aid and part-time artist, a middle-aged hottie who's dumped plenty of action since her son's Egyptian father split, and makes short work of Jack. And he's so smitten, even after she dumps him, too, with the same feminist logic that motivated Joryleen ("You're
married, Jack, I tried to forget it but you wouldn't let me ... You're a sad, sweet man, but if you call after you go out the door, it'll be harassment"), that he moons after Ahmad instead. And so happens to catch him on his way into the Tunnel.
Ahmad's "control", Charlie, turns out to be an FBI undercover, and is found headless, slaughtered by the terrorist cell members he'd infiltrated, within view of the Statue of Liberty. Ahmad, ripped on religious zeal, and Jack, zipped on insightful hopelessness, roll into Lincoln Tunnel together in the morning rush, Jack noting that even the tunnel guards have disappeared "since we all started to let things slide ..."
The point is to get to the lowest ebb of the Tunnel, where it jogs right slightly before starting its ascent, an engineering Achilles' heel. That'll be the place to push the sunken red button in the military drab metal box sutured between the driver's and passenger's seats, and strike a blow for militant Islam ... But ... nice Ahmad gets distracted by Levy's babbling about the Jets fumbling the kickoff at Giants' Stadium the night before, and by two cute little black kids in a Volvo station wagon, pressed against the rear window glass ahead of him ... Levy'd been gambling on Ahmad's "
Rabbitness", the tiny "Kafirs" making goo-goo eyes and pulling their mouths with their fingers into Emmett Kelly grotesques just to get a rise out of the handsome truck driver ... The moment passes. They're driving up. The primal light of New York City bathes the death truck in ironic grace. Levy, once more a guidance counselor, tells Ahmad to disarm the rig and get it back to Jersey, but insists on using the George Washington Bridge, so as not to tempt the Tunnel devils again ...
In a world of Penis Patch computer spam and deadly American fun-hoggery, it's good to have a writer of John Updike's quality, still hitting them out safely.