Osama bin Laden and Fiction

Why have American novelists failed to tell convincing stories about terrorists?

From a story in the New Republic...

Part of the problem is lack of knowledge. The conventional wisdom about Osama bin Laden, we now know, was all wrong. He wasn’t secreted off in some remote cave deep within the hills of the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, far from civilization. Instead he was in a Pakistani McMansion, a generously proportioned compound surrounded by concrete and barbed wire, situated a stone’s throw from a prestigious military academy in a a midsize city. To be sure, the digitally rendered immediacy of bin Laden’s killing—from the nearly instantaneous reports of the raid in electronic media to the much-circulated Google Earth screen shots of his hideout—make it all seem bizarrely proximate. But our collective imagination of the inner workings of Al Qaeda proved deeply at odds with the reality. And, as the efforts of novelists have shown, the place we still cannot travel is the mind of a jihadist.

The most egregious demonstration of this was John Updike’s Terrorist, from 2006, in which the main character—an Arab-American teenager in the thrall of a storefront imam—is patched together so incompletely that, as James Wood wrote in his review of the novel for TNR, Updike’s attempts to give him depth are like “icing a hollow cake.” In contrast, the protagonist of Pearl Abraham’s American Taliban, which came out last year, is boldly imagined and certainly no stereotype: John Jude Parish is a blond surfer and skateboarder who is vaguely drawn to mysticism in a typical teenage-slacker manner. When a broken leg keeps him away from his sports, he finds in studying Arabic the discipline his life is lacking; his meandering path leads him from the Arabic-language school in Brooklyn to an Islamic academy in Peshawar and, from there, to an Al Qaeda training camp. But Parish is so far from a typical terrorist, his journey so wild and fantastic, that he sheds little light on the phenomenon more generally.

One could argue that Western novelists have a strike against them from the start. Are we likely to trust that a writer named Updike or Abraham can have insight into the mind of a jihadist? While they both have things of value to say, their uncertainty about their subject matter shows through on the page in the lack of precision that each brings to the Islamic trappings surrounding their character. A certain shorthand is being called upon, gesturing at things we think we know about—things we have heard about—but do not really know. What is a storefront imam, anyway? What does his mosque feel like inside? We get a description—up a flight of stairs, through a double door, carpets that need to be vacuumed, and so on—but it is so unvisceral that one can almost see the novelist standing behind the curtain with his pen and paper, taking care to make note of the adjacent nail salon and check-cashing establishment. Updike admitted that his research for the novel was superficial—he even consulted a book called The Koran for Dummies.