Fat is everywhere. There’s even a term for the fat squeezed up from the waist of a woman’s too-tight jeans: the “muffin top.” In our self-flagellating society, it’s an article of faith that we’re all too fat, overfed on Z-grade Big Mac meat, freedom fries sautéed in beef tallow. The public gorged itself on Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me, only to doze off into an ursine contentment: On the one sausage-fingered hand, it’s penance to mock “our” fat; on the other, it’s bad manners to tell an individual that he ought to lose a few.
The intellectual elite, for all its claims to love nuance and complexity, prefers announcing the problems of large groups (fast food, consumer culture) to analyzing the pathologies of a man on the street. And so I hoped that John Updike’s Terrorist, which follows the crooked path of a New Jersey high-school boy named Ahmad Ashmawy, would leave behind the root casuistry so popular among commentators on terrorism—the dubious threat of Mickey D’s imperialism, the all-purpose bogeyman of Third World poverty vs. our own fleshy overabundance.
In short, I hoped that Updike would give us a person, unfamiliar and unpredictable as we expect a potential murderer to be.
Why do they hate us? is a tired question, one which plays no part in winning a war. Why do they hate us enough to choose suicide and murder? is, however,
