June 8, 2007

Dear Colleague:  

    Readers of "Dear Colleague" will know that I am an admirer of the novelist John Updike. I reviewed his book, In the Beauty of the Lilies, for the Journal of Historical Geography. In my review, I pointed out the extraordinary care Updike took in capturing the look, feel, and smell of America in the period 1900-1980. What magazines were on sale in a small-town drugstore in 1920? What faded advertisement would one see painted on the back wall of a warehouse? And so on. But, then, Updike had 22 research assistants to help him get the facts right. No professor enjoys that kind of luxury.

    Now I have just read his most recent novel, Terrorist. It is about a teenager, born of an Egyptian father and an Irish-American mother, who attended Central High School in New Prospect, New Jersey. He was a serious young man, a good student, who embraced Islam and the call to martyrdom. Why did he do it when he could well have gone on to college (Harvard would have loved someone of his mixed ethnic background) to become—well, anyone he wants to be, including the champion of Islam in a country of heathens? No. To Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy, that long and tortuous path offered too many pitfalls. He was too young, too impatient, and, above all, too enamored of the idea of purity for that path to be even mildly tempting. He appreciated the beauty of America—there was a wonderful description of his driving a truck toward Manhattan (Ahmad found a job delivering furniture) and pausing in wonder at the surreal beauty of its skyline in late afternoon light. But even more he felt dismay and disgust for the world he knew best--the students and teachers at his high school. There was one exception, the school's guidance counselor, a sixty-three year old Jew by the name of Jack Levy. And that was because Levy shared Ahmad's disgust at the inconsequentiality of people's lives—the low opinion they had of themselves, the teachers yearning to kick off their shoes at the end of the day, and early retirement, the students believing that they were doing pretty good when they managed to buy some flashy-trashy new outfit at half price, or lay a girl with big tits.

    Mohammad went to heaven on a white steed. Ahmad was told that he would get there even faster. The explosion would translate him in an instant, painlessly, from the drabness of this life to the glory of the next. What about the innocent people who would also be killed? What innocent people, Ahmad might ask. The Imman didn't exactly brainwash the boy, who saw only too clearly himself, on a daily basis, cruelty, vanity, greed, sloth, and pulchritude in his peers, redeemed only on the rarest occasion by a flash of intelligence or an act of kindness.

    Ahmad, the eighteen-year old martyr, was to drive a white truck packed with explosives through the Lincoln Tunnel and set them off at the tunnel's weakest point, which was where it made a slight turn. There followed, dear reader, the novelist's art—a meticulous description and evocation of the trip to the Tunnel, the sights, sounds, and smells, the traffic jams, the unexpected swift passage through the toll both, the entry into darkness and a different world of sounds and smells... As Ahmad drove, he could see a boy and a girl at the rear window in the car ahead waving at him. Without thinking, he waved back, and as he did so, he realized with a slight shock that he was already at the tunnel's weakest point and that he needed to undo the safety latch, flip it back, and press hard against the red button...

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu