Daniel Marsula, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger image. "TERRORIST" By John Updike. Knopf ($24.95)

John Updike's latest novel represents his attempt to ponder the mind of a young man who is prepared to die in the cause of jihad. Despite occasional glimpses of his masterly prose style, the keen phrase-turning and the many-hued palette of his social and political observations, the novel is a clunker.

Ahmad has just graduated from high school in New Prospect, N.J., a dying mill town reminiscent of Paterson. The son of an Egyptian father, who has long since fled, and an Irish-American mother, Ahmad has devoted himself to Islam and to the Quran since he was 11.

In high school he was aloof, had few friends and was largely ignored by his teachers. An aging guidance counselor, Jack Levy, finally takes an interest in him weeks before his graduation, but he can do little to interest Ahmad in college. Instead, Ahmad plans to be a truck driver.

He's influenced by Shaikh Rashid, his imam, an embittered elderly intellectual whose mosque is merely a suite of offices above a Vietnamese beauty salon in a seedy part of town.

Some of the most awkwardly written passages in the book occur in the conversations between Ahmad and his imam. Possibly Updike thought this virtuoso display of Quranic criticism gave credence to his characters, but it comes across as posturing and intrusive.

Meanwhile, Levy, who until this point has been portrayed as a burned-out, acidly depressive fallen Jew in the twilight of his career, unaccountably turns up at Ahmad's apartment in a last-ditch effort to wheedle him into applying to college.

Now, the pace of the novel picks up. Levy begins an affair with Ahmad's mother, and in describing the sexual give-and-take between the two, Updike is at last in his metier. His lively prose, taking in all the sagging flesh and post-coital odors of these two "aging infidels" (as Ahmad thinks of them) is as tender and bittersweet as a Philip Pearlstein nude.

Through the intercession of his imam, Ahmad begins a job with a Lebanese furniture business. The conversations that he has with his boss, Charlie Chehab, also further the action, as Charlie delicately probes Ahmad's willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Unfortunately, the author is too much with us, the stagehands of his plot heard tromping in the darkness as they move furniture and props around for each new scene.

Rather more humorous but equally operatic is the appearance of the secretary for Homeland Security, whose chief underling just happens to be Jack Levy's sister-in-law. Updike's deft parody of Tom Ridge is right on:

"He is a large man, with a slab of muscle across his back that gives the tailors of his dark-blue suits extra trouble. In his massive head, his mouth looks truculently small. His haircut, on that same head, also looks small, like a hat belonging to someone else but jammed on anyway."

If not for this startling coincidence, and that Levy has made some offhand comments about Ahmad to his wife, who passed them blithely on to her sister, the last hint of narrative tension might have left this book in the lurch.

A plot thus buttressed is bound to fail. But the devil is also in the details, and once in a while, Updike's writing is just plain bad.

While it is remarked upon again and again that Ahmad is mature beyond his years, would he really be thinking that his imam conducts his lessons with a "maieutic, a teasing-forth, from his student, of necessary shadows and complications, thus enriching a shallow and starkly innocent faith"?

Because of writing like this, it is hard to care about the plot or the characters, as they seem little more than mouthpieces for Updike's novel of ideas.

Updike has simply failed to convince me of the motivation behind Ahmad's nihilist fantasy. While it is admirable that he seems to have carefully studied the 114 suras of the Quran and while it is compelling that he set his novel in a town close to his own Pennsylvania roots, in the end, as the secretary for Homeland Security might say, the low intensity of this chatter does not warrant recommending this novel.