Jihad on the turnpike.

Terrorist, by John Updike (Knopf, 320 pp., $24.95)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

TO praise John Updike ought to require what the lawyers call standing. You should be in a position to bestow it--that is, your good words should be worth a damn. Praising the obviously accomplished not only courts presumption, inviting the riposte of Dr. Johnson, "Consider with yourself what your flattery is worth, before you bestow it so freely"; it's also a great bore. Still, one is tempted to dive into the cyber-vaults of LEXIS/NEXIS and pour out the borrowed, syrupy encomia as thickly as possible and claim the sentiments as one's own. But sometimes they are one's own.

John Updike, to put a fine point on it, has been the chronicler of the American promise for half a century, perhaps the most consequential writer of fiction in our time. Among all contemporary authors, he is most the journeyman, writing to and for the moment, but without the pedestrian attitude; he looks above, below, and beyond the surfaces. Within the pages of well over 50 books in as many years, ranging from fiction to poetry to literary and art criticism, this consummate craftsman has, with daring and elan, held up a mirror to both America's ideals and its illusions. Although he has described a peculiar radiance vibrating in the American soul--with a sense of immense, latent potential and idealistic faith in a Better Tomorrow--some of what he has shown us about ourselves has not been flattering. But then we wouldn't expect an artist to flatter. However much he has turned over the rocks of our character to reveal what lies teeming and writhing beneath, his confidence in an essential goodness and vibrancy about America and its people doesn't seem to flag.

"The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter," Updike has said, "are the old apartments of religion," and he has signed a long lease on them. He takes religion seriously and always has. No matter what he's explored in the way of social manners and mores, not to mention what happens behind the shutters, man's quest for transcendence, for a higher meaning beyond the passing scene--ultimately for God--has always played the same role in his fiction as a basso ostinato does in music, a haunting line rumbling along below the tripping, twittering themes quivering in the air above, yet holding everything together; it's always there, often more felt than heard, or, to switch senses, less the light seen than the light seen by. Now he enters those old apartments of religion again, but this time through a very different door.

Nobody has ever accused the au courant Updike of a disinclination to be topical, but with his new novel, Terrorist, he's taken topicality to a dark, all too current place. This book is a bold literary effort to come to terms with the post-9/11 world, which has been for America a deadly face-off with the Other: a force for utter, all-out barbarity, comprehensible to Western minds only with the most taxing exertions. Yet as this force has been thrust upon our time, it's as ripe for artistic handling as any other struggle engaging the human heart, and Updike has drawn a sympathetic, if not sympathizing, picture of one slice of radical Islamic life as seen through the eyes of a New Jersey teenager.

The story revolves around Ahmad Mulloy, an 18-year-old son of an Egyptian immigrant father, who skipped out on the boy before he got to know him, and an American mother of Irish extraction, a nurse's aide who has raised her son as best she could by herself in New Prospect, a rusting city rife with economic discontent. Ahmad, presumably seeking a connection to his absent father--he longs to adopt his father's surname when he finishes school--finds a makeshift mosque in a shabby neighborhood and converts to Islam at the age of 11. He then slowly begins building a new enlightened self under the intense gaze of a shadowy imam, Shaikh Rashid, who instructs him in the Koran several times a week after school, admonishing him to keep to the straight road, not the wayward one laid out by the devils of American materialism and Godlessness. "I seek to walk the Straight Path," Ahmad earnestly tells a coworker. "In this country, it is not easy. There are too many paths, too much selling of many useless things. They brag of freedom, but freedom to no purpose becomes a kind of prison."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ahmad grows into what we can only call a geeky high-school student at Central High. He holds himself stiffly aloof from his fellow students, most of whom are inner-city blacks and Hispanics marking time and living wasted lives; he steadfastly swears off drugs and partying while wearing his invariable garb of spotless, pressed white shirt and black jeans every day. He befriends a sassy black girl, Joryleen, who sings in a gospel choir, and butts up against the noisome bulk of her boyfriend, comically named, in a gesture worthy of Dickens, Tylenol Jones. The American Dream seems remote for these young people. Ahmad, like his classmates, has "tasted American plenty by licking its undersides"; he counts himself among the dispossessed. But he is a solid student with near-perfect attendance. So when a jaded guidance counselor, Jack Levy, takes a tardy interest in Ahmad's future two months before graduation, wondering why the mysterious imam has been urging him away from the college track in favor of the vocational--his destiny, it's been prayerfully decided, is to drive trucks--the plot accelerates.

Here any responsible synopsis will halt. Suffice it to say that Ahmad quickly gets caught up in a small but efficient radical underground and ignites within himself a wish to become--in Shaikh Rashid's words--a shahid (martyr) "whose love of God is unqualified, and who impatiently thirsts for the glory of Paradise." With dazzling memories of the burning World Trade Towers (barely visible from the heights of New Prospect a few years before) still vivid in his soldier's heart, he gets recruited and groomed as a homegrown terrorist to carry out more holy acts of destruction on American soil in pursuit of the international jihad against pretty much everybody not beguiled by radical Islam's hatreds.

The rest of the story moves quickly, inexorably, to its end, engendering more than a few palpitations in the alert reader. Updike is not known as a writer of page-turning thrillers, but he has plotted Terrorist in such a way that, for once, we are not as taken with his trademark observations and well-turned reveries--Updike's famous exfoliations--as we are with our eagerness to discover what happens. Yet the author is never less than himself. His prose still delights occasionally with its reticulated, baroque grandeur, though this book is written far more simply than most of his are. And the atmosphere he creates is incandescent, throwing light on the dark, interior universe of alien minds and the pungent exotica of Islamist beliefs.

Most impressively, he manages to make a terrorist, admittedly young and gullible, a sympathetic subject. We can hate the deeds dreamt of, but not so much the dreamer. That's the sweet trap. For no matter how many of the militantly arcane lessons offered up by his imam he takes on board, Ahmad remains a queerly admirable fellow, as Updike is disturbingly adept at taking us into his questing, if rigidly misguided, spirit. This is not a feat most novelists could perform.

"Dreams come true," Updike has written elsewhere, for "without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." Here we're reminded of just how nightmarish some of those dreams can be. Once again he explores religion with its many comforts and contradictions--but this time he also spins out the consequences of a religious faith hopelessly perverted and dangerously obscure to those who don't share it. It's a horrific tale he weaves, one all the more dreadful for being plausible.

Mr. Simmons is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, and author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin.