TERRORIST恐怖分子

內(nèi)容概要

　　Starred Review. Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to
describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last
five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that
packs a gut punch. Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is 18 and attends Central
High School in the New York metro area working class city of New
Prospect, N.J. He is the son of an Egyptian exchange student who
married a working-class Irish-American girl and then disappeared
when Ahmad was three. Ahmad, disgusted by his mother's inability to
get it together, is in the thrall of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a
storefront mosque and preaches divine retribution for "devils,"
including the "Zionist dominated federal government." The list of
devils is long: it includes Joryleen Grant, the wayward
African-American girl with a heart of gold; Tylenol Jones, a black
tough guy with whom Ahmad obliquely competes for Joryleen's
attentions (which Ahmad eventually pays for); Jack Levy, a Central
High guidance counselor who at 63 has seen enough failure,
including his own, to last him a lifetime (and whose Jewishness
plays a part in a manner unthinkable before 9/11); Jack's wife,
Beth, as ineffectual and overweight (Updike is merciless on this)
as she is oblivious; and Teresa Mulloy, a nurse's aide and Sunday
painter as desperate for Jack's attention, when he takes on Ahmad's
case, as Jack is for hers. Updike has distilled all their flaws to
a caustic, crystalline essence; he dwells on their poor bodies and
the debased world in which they move unrelentingly, and with a
dispassionate cruelty that verges on shocking. Ahmad's revulsion
for American culture doesn't seem to displease Updike one iota. But
Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap
surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real
story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame
(that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that
leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work-all are
here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their
banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in
putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting
them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances
rather than spoils the novel.
　　Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the
Hardcover edition.

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