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.
