The ever-surprising John Updike's twenty-second novel is a brilliant
contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most
powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his
devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him
by a local mosque's imam.
The son of a bohemian Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who
disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of
eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic
society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect,
in northern New Jersey. Neither the world-weary, depressed guidance
counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad's mischievously
seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in diverting the boy
from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When he finds employment
in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese,
the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that rouse
the Department of Homeland Security.
But to quote the Qur'an: Of those who plot is God the best.
