James Wood joins the likes of Christopher Hitchens as he lets John Updike have it for his latest sins against the language:
But John Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject--at least as soon as he saw the results on the page. Terrorist portrays an eighteen-year-old American Muslim named Ahmad, who, as the novel begins, is about to graduate from his New Jersey high school. Ahmad "is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by extraction, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the hot muddy fields of the overflowing Nile." (Ah, those Egyptians. This lofty genealogy is an extraordinary example of airy Orientalism, which, because the sentence combines baking and mud, clumsily manages to imply that the ancestors were somehow baked in mud. Egyptian bog people! Does Updike reread his own prose?) Ahmad has been violently influenced by his imam at the local storefront mosque, one Shaikh Rashid. As we encounter him at the start of the book, Ahmad is already boiling over with anti-American thoughts; we are thus offered no idea of what he was like before meeting the imam, what he was like as, say, a moderately Islamic fifteen-year-old.
Registration is required but is oh-so-worth it. (Thanks, as ever, to Dave Lull.)
I have to defend this particular quotation. (I like Updike, but suspect "Terrorist" is terrible.) Egyptian ovens are traditionally made of mud -- and Updike's image is of the operation of the sun on the mud of the Nile's banks to create a similar oven in which the people are baked. Think it silly or not, the image of being baked in mud is not careless.
"The first known people to cultivate wheat and barley, the ancient Egyptians are credited with being the first bakers. They used to crush the wheat and barley, sieve the flour, and cut the dough before putting it into ovens made from mud, explained Nadia Qoutb of the Egyptian Agricultural Museum." http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/553/fe1.htm
Posted by: Capybara | June 26, 2006 at 11:39 AM