The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

  Of the International Booker Prize shortlist for 2026, The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar is my penultimate read, with only the winner remaining. This year’s International Booker Prize seems to have much more of a theme than last, each book reflecting some level of arbitrary rule and tension between the individual and societal expectations. Bazyar explores these ideas through the sometimes confusing historical milieu of Iran, jumping through the narrative in decades across generations: Behzad in 1979, Nahid in 1989, Laleh in 1999, Mo in 2009, and Tara’s un-yeared epilogue.

Like other novels that have multiple narrators, I feel like each section took some acclimatizing. Every new decade was an adjustment period, and it took me probably fifteen pages or so to really get into the flow of the ‘new voice.’ By the end of each section, I felt generally invested; in particular, Behzad’s section involves a plan to transport leaflets and operate through cloak and dagger to contribute to a Marxist revolution. The plan involves a car tradeoff, secret passwords, and mysterious signals like a woman standing in a doorway. That political intrigue was one of the most compelling moments in the first half of the book for me; I also liked Behzad’s quiet, nearly invisible romance with Nahid and the way it developed through a few glances at revolutionary meetings.

Nahid’s section takes on a more domestic flavour—that is, on the surface. Below the surface, there’s a clear concern with the people who’ve been imprisoned, the people who’ve been lost, and the guilt that goes along with leaving them behind. One of my favourite scenes in Nahid’s part is when she and her husband receive a letter that offers a surface reading and a hidden one. The letter “spoke of a lightning strike, a crumbling in the backyard, and rats scuttering through the cracks and getting into her house” (82). It goes on to talk about a rat “hiding stubbornly in her kitchen” enjoying a “nice life of food and familial love” (82). The letters ends in italics: “Walls are crumbling everywhere, and they’ll never stop!” (82). I love the scene of Behzad and Nahid reading the letter together, agreeing, among other things, that the crumbling walls referenced a bomb hitting the prison where their friend was being held, implying that the rat in the house is a harboured former political prisoner. I appreciate the way The Nights are Quiet in Tehran shows how new networks of meaning form in response to censorship, to oppression.

Of all the sections, though, Laleh’s was by far my favourite. The section takes place after years in Germany and Laleh returns with her mother to Iran. Her experience as a teenage girl in Iran, alienated from her friends and relatives, is the most compelling and personal experience in the book. It gives the book a beautiful balance between the historico-political context and the more tangible everyday experiences that define us. Watching Laleh do something as simple as getting her eyebrows done or keeping a secret boyfriend is elevated to an epic status. It’s also around this time that I started reading the book aloud and really noticed the beautiful cadence of the phrases. There’s a beauty that is easy to gloss over if reading too quickly, but following the punctuation gives the sentences a warmly hypnotic quality.

For Mo’s part, the voice is very different. His priorities are very different from his sibling’s and I was pleasantly taken aback by the mention of Russian ska-punk in the opening pages. While Laleh grows into a politically engaged adult (like her parents), Mo is more concerned about his social bonds. He somewhat reluctantly gets involved with the student protests and stays up late watching Youtube videos about Iran when his friend’s girlfriend comes to sleep in his bed. Mo’s concerns are generally less political, and he distances himself from his family’s engagements—at least for the first stages of his journey.

All of the International Booker Prize short list have been good, even great, but Bazyar’s entry falls into the middle of the pack for me through no fault of her own. I think if I were more informed and educated about the history of Tehran and Iran in general, some of the more quiet resonances would land more meaningfully. Keeping track of the different allegiances and the symbolism of small actions would be a little easier.

That being said, I liked The Nights are Quiet in Tehran. While my interest in the sections fluctuates and I need to reset at each new decade, ultimately I found myself connecting with the characters and getting entranced by the pace and rhythms of the writing. There was a lot to like, and, while I have a lot of gaps in my own knowledge, it did make me feel like a more competent and worldly person. I hope that’s true, but it may be too utopian.

Oh, and one more thing: the epilogue offers a glimpse into the future (?). By virtue of the section not having a specific date listed, we might want to believe it’s 2019 to fit the pattern, but the lack of a year suggests that a resolution is both too far off and that it could happen at any moment. The epilogue is about the renewal following the death of an oppressive leader. It’s a moment of liberation, a moment of return for Behzad and Nahid. I hope I live to see that moment.

Happy reading!

Unearthing Joy by Gholdy Muhammad

    It’s a common phrase in professional learning contexts to “recognize your learning edge and push it.” As a follow up to her Cultivating Genius, Gholdy Muhammad’s Unearthing Joy offers a somewhat more comprehensive framework for schools to focus on the pursuits she outlined in her previous text: identity, intellect, skills, criticality, and joy. For many, this will be a challenge to conventional ways of engaging in curriculum, specifically in centering joy as a fundamental component of education.

    For many, I suspect this book may be a little bit…light(?) given the context of where education has been over the last fifteen years. It’s somewhat of a shift away from promoting educational standards (more on that momentarily) towards a more humanized approach. You won’t find discussion of Bloom’s Taxonomy or the zone of proximal development in any kind of depth here, but you will see a reconceptualization of the connection between students and their teachers. The design of the book itself aims to ‘slow’ us and help us find joy; each chapter has a colouring book page and a playlist of joyful songs to get us in the right mindset. Heck, the foreword is written by Pharrell Williams (the quintessentially “Happy” guy!). In the foreword, he discusses how teachers can be constellations and sources of light to help students become aware of their genius, recognize their limitlessness, and experience joy at school. This is largely rooted in becoming their best selves. He presents the thesis of the book as follows: “Schools must not only create a joyful ethos, but also sustain it to activate the human spirit” (10). He gives a cosmic flare to the preamble that puts joy as the guiding force of the universe that helps to awaken the genius of each student’s spirit: “if you want to see and believe in the infinite possibilities of education, just look up at the sky, look at nature, look at the goodwill inhumanity, and you will know” (10).

    The conception of joy that Muhammad offers, however, is more complex than you might be picturing. It goes beyond simple happiness. In a sidebar, she identifies 10 lessons of joy from historical examples, where joy is “defined by one’s truths, justice, problem-solving, anti-racism, and anti-oppression” (69). Joy is also when we “define abolition as education and education as abolition” or “liberty for all” (69). It is about centering love, music, and art, but also about connecting to justice and criticality (69). Joy is “collective and collaborative” (69). Joy is not a passive feeling; joy is an action—a choice that we can cultivate together. Like other pursuits, joy can change over time (72). 

    Muhammad’s approach in this text mimics that of Cultivating Genius. She is always in the process of historicizing. For example, she looks back to documents like the New England Primer and challenges their usefulness in schools as a white supremacist document, evaluating it based around the five pursuits. I have to admit, sometimes the historicizing feels like it detracts from what we’re trying to accomplish now. Having a few case studies can be helpful for showing how educational frameworks need to shift, but dwelling in the particulars of what wasn’t working makes it difficult to advance in our actual practice. I have a bit of a bias when it comes to professional learning books; I think they need to offer something tangible and applicable. To be fair, none of this work can be done without reflection, but I wanted to see more praxis: how does this new framework actually look in classrooms today? Providing tools and models, in my opinion, deserved more balance in the text. 

    That being said, the text is partially rooted in classroom teaching but also has a broader applicability. I could see the value of the text for program leads at the level of the school board or curriculum writers at the board. In one chapter, Muhammad offers a list of problems with curricula and some suggestions for curriculum and instruction that would be well worth exploring at various levels of the educational edifice. She offers suggestions like creating a rubric for curriculum writers to follow, asking publishing companies to conduct random focus groups to test curriculum’s effectiveness, and other large-scale actions that could create a significant difference in the types of instruction that are being done.

    One of the common refrains in Unearthing Joy is that we are too focused on skill development and standards, which I think is a hard conception to grapple with when so much of our education system is rooted in that which is measurable. I take some issue with abandoning the notion of ‘standards,’ but Muhammad’s framework successfully reorients towards pursuits. In her words, “Standards have a ceiling or stopping point, while pursuits continue throughout one’s life” (17). In reframing the conversation around educational pursuits, it allows us that flexibility to continue growing, to recognize that we are imperfect, and to allow ourselves to shape and reshape our priorities. The pursuits that she identifies are essentially a repetition of her work from Cultivating Genius: identity development, skills development, intellectual development, criticality, and joy. In practice, I find it somewhat challenging to differentiate between these; specifically, “intellectual development” is about “gaining knowledge that connects to the context of the world where they can apply the skills and standards” (17). To me, if the knowledge connects to the world, we’re into the realm of criticality (“helping students to name, understand, question, and disrupt oppression in the world and within the self, and to make the world a better place” (17). If we’re looking at intellect as opportunities to apply the skills and standards, that fits more into “skills development” in my mind. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter that there’s ambiguity between the pursuits if you can embrace a sense of interconnectedness, but I think other instructional frameworks are more intuitive.

    I’m not entirely sold, either, on Muhammad’s de-emphasis of skills—though I think we have different conceptions of what skills look like in the classroom. I think back to John Dewey’s educational philosophy in which (I’m paraphrasing) teaching children to use a chainsaw is less helpful than teaching them how a chainsaw operates. Muhammad seems to suggest skills are happening in isolation and its their decontextualization that means they should be de-emphasized. For example, learning phonemes with a text that doesn’t promote other thinking is useless; learning calculation skills is useless when not applied to anything practical or real. I agree that teaching skills abstracted from applicability is not ideal—but that’s also not what I see in classrooms. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I think students are learning valuable skills that aren’t separate from criticality. Students learn reading strategies, for example, as a way of challenging harmful messages in the media. So, with that in mind, I think learning transferable skills (the mechanics of a chainsaw) actually has a rightful place as central to our work as teachers, though I grant that we need to help students to make those connections to the real world and center their applicability.

    Conversely, I find the framework liberatory in a sense. If you’re in the world of teaching, you know you’re supposed to be everything to everyone all the time. You need to be promoting literacy but also numeracy but also you have to be a mental health professional while also an expert in special education and don’t forget that career pathway planning needs to be brought in. The real benefit of the ‘pursuits’ that Muhammad emphasizes for me is that she explicitly says they’re not going to be present in every lesson. She encourages staff to think about the broader unit and ensure that the pursuits are all present in some capacity somewhere, and that, I think is a real benefit of this framework: you are free to emphasize different things at different types responsively to students.

    I alluded earlier to my difficulty with removing our emphasis on ‘standards’. I understand why: “standards are stagnant. They are not created for individual learners, whereas pursuits come from and are designed for the learner” (72). I can appreciate that mindset, but it does pose a serious challenge to our education system: how are we to gather data or measure our effectiveness if standards are no longer the aim? Within this framework, we still hold high expectations for students and we promote rigor, but I’m not yet clear on how to measure whether we’re actually rigorous. At the same time, I think it’s Muhammad that expressed how “rigour without relevance isn’t rigorous” and I really like that conception of what it means to be a strong teacher and student. If we’re not doing things that are meaningful and are just doing hard tasks because they’re hard, then it’s a challenge to justify doing that work at all.

    Another framework Muhammad applies is helpful for structuring classes. In talking about culturally responsive and relevant teaching, there are different phases that teachers move through. One is to merely highlight contributions—celeberating a holiday here and there at a surface level. Additive means that there’s supplementary material that speaks to the diversity of our world but it’s an after thought or framed as being a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than a necessary. Transformation is when diverse cultural perspectives and voices reshape our curriculum and ultimately we want to move towards a stage of authentic problem solving in our curricula. That, to me, is a great rubric for thinking about how well teachers are doing in their own work as agents of social change and as cultivators of student genius. 

    I also appreciate that Muhammad has no patience for the idea of teachers ‘buying in’ to the work. It is not her responsibility to ‘sell’ us the vision of CRRP. If it were, though, I think she offers an incisive commentary for why we should be centering (for example) anti-Black racism. When challenged on the idea of why we should be focusing on Black students, she essentially uses them as a barometer for the success of the system: “if you want to transform a system for everyone, start with the group for which we have not gotten it right the most” (78). She suggests that if we can get it right for the most historically marginalized, it advances education for all, and to me that is a perfectly distilled philosophy for how and why we go about educational reform.

    Alongside instruction, assessment needs to change to better align with the identities of students and be responsive to their needs. Again, Muhammad offers a step-by-step process of what we should be doing—getting to know students comes first. Much of what she says in the realm of assessment, in my view, is not completely revolutionary. It involves things like giving students choice to show their understanding in different ways or doing a variety of assessments (diagnostic, formative, etc.) to cultivate skills. All of that has been firmly entrenched in Ontario for decades through the Growing Success document and differentiated instruction. Granted, I’m sure it’s not leveraged as much as it could be (is it ever?), but it makes me curious about what’s happening in the states that this is a revolutionary kind of approach. One thing that I think we still need to work on, which Muhammad would I’m sure agree, is that we need more authentic kinds of assessments with authentic audiences. For example, having students engage in a project to make the school more wheelchair accessible or having students develop a policy idea for ending a racist practice at the municipal level—these would be really meaningful learning experiences that could be assessed in conjunction with community organizations or community members. That’s the kind of action I really want to see grow.

    As I mentioned, the ‘practical’ side of things is somewhat lacking. There are a few sample lesson plans, but I don’t think of them as nearly as thorough as they would be in my context. There are unit plans presented as half-pages that give key questions or point-form topics that will address each of the five pursuits, but I wish there was a supplement that had more fleshed-out unit plans than those. One of the common complaints about professional development is that its providers are ‘out of touch.’ My fear in providing such cursory lessons and unit plans is that Unearthing Joy opens itself to that attack. To really see how the framework operates, I think we need to see how it connects with other aspects of lesson planning (connecting to specific expectations in curriculum documents, showing the accommodations that might be needed or the ‘plan B’ lesson for when kids don’t understand yet; I wish I could see some assignment sheets and get a timeline for how these parts all flow into one another). The learning goals and success criteria used as examples, I feel, don’t really match what we’re supposed to do in Ontario. For example, when the success criteria starts “I can learn _____”, to me, that sounds like a learning goal. Success criteria would need to be more precise in how the student knows or demonstrates that they’ve learned it. If the goal is to learn about the underground railroad, for example, perhaps the success criteria is that students can give five examples of significant secret codes and explain why the code system contributed to liberation. It’s a minor gripe, to be sure, but one that felt a little undercooked in the example lessons.

    Overall, Unearthing Joy offers a meaningful liberatory philosophy for education, and I really appreciate that about it. I think Muhammad and I are aligned in many ways, but have some differences of opinion of how this looks in practice. As a text, Unearthing Joy could probably restore a bit more balance between the historical / theoretical and the practical application of the framework. There is indeed a lot to unearth here, and it motivates me to be the kind of educator that builds connection with students, transforms education in response to their identities, helps them to find meaningful, authentic joy through social action, and beyond—I just hope that more specific examples of lesson plans and units will emerge to clarify some of the stickier points of the book and show its viability in practice. And if not? Well, then, maybe it’s up to me and my students to make and share those resources.

Joyful reading!

Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West by Aidan Moher

I experienced some of my first RPGs as a child: specifically, I adored Earthbound and Super Mario RPG as Super Nintendo classics. A little later, when the world of emulation opened my world, I think I first got drawn into the vibrant colour of Final Fantasy V and the joy of job changes, which changed the look of the sprites in fun and engaging ways. I think I got distracted partway through the game and started Final Fantasy VI and was literally astounded by its gorgeous artistry and lively cast of characters. In grade 8, I bought Final Fantasy VII and joined the ranks of the kids that became obsessed.

I’m in good company with Aidan Moher, who sounds like he had a similar experience as a Canadian teenage boy wrapped up in the world of RPGs and punk rock. Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West is a love letter to that experience. Part of what makes the project work is that Moher takes a few paths when describing these games, allowing personal memory and experiences parallel to reviews, historical notes, and commentary. Drawing from both his voice and the voices of others gives the text a well-rounded and complete view of the history of RPGs—or at least as complete as a survey can be.

There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which the children have a diorama competition. Principal Skinner reveals Ralph Wiggum’s diorama, which is a collection of in-package Star Wars figures. He exclaims: “Why, it’s Luke! And Obi-Wan! And my favourite: Chewie!” The enthusiasm in his voice is palpable and reading Fight, Magic, Items was a little like that for me: “Why, it’s Chrono Trigger! It’s Terranigma! It’s Eternal Sonata!” Even lesser-known titles get a place in his history. For the games I played, I felt that swell of nostalgia. For the games I hadn’t, I felt a curiosity to see how it fit in with the trajectory of the genre.

When it comes to describing this trajectory, Moher goes through a few threads that give the text a richness of detail. In describing the entries into the genre, Moher sometimes goes into detail about the development of technology to explain why games took the shape they did. Simultaneously, Moher includes details about the features or mechanics of games themselves and how they fit into, pushed, evolved, or revolutionized the genre. The title of the book highlights the rise of Japanese RPGs in the West, and I would say the book partly delivers on its promise to explain why cultural shifts empowered the Japanese aesthetic to ‘go global.’ It serves as a pretty compelling social and cultural history, so even if you’re not interested in JRPGs in particular, if you’re interested in video games there’s probably still enough here to latch onto—heck, even if you’re into anime, there’s some explanation of how it helped to push for Japanese culture in the West.

Like the journalist and author Jason Schreier, who is cited several times in the book, Moher weaves some pretty compelling narratives by drawing on particular figures in the world of game development. Moher provides brief profiles of game developers and tells some interesting anecdotes of their ups and downs. The creators of Dragon Quest and Suikoden and Fantasian Neo Dimension and Kingdom Hearts all get their due. Also, here’s a weird and wild fact that somehow makes perfect sense: author Haruki Murakami is connected to Earthbound because the creator of Earthbound Shigesato Itoi co-authored a short story collection with Murakami. The book is full of fun little tidbits like that.

Moher’s book does critique very well. He has a knack for highlighting what is best in these games. He explains why different games work—or, when the games are sub-par, at least aspects of why they work or what makes them significant. He comments on tone, characterization, plot, mechanics, immersion, music, and other hallmarks of good game design. For games that flopped, Moher identifies some reasons that they failed but still finds some reasons for praise. He’s got a generous, appreciator’s eye.

If there’s an area I’d like more of, it’s the analysis and interpretation of games. Granted, that’s not really what this book is. We’re dealing with history here, not philosophy or criticism. Still, when discussing Nier Automata’s multiple endings, repetition, and humanity, I would have loved to have gone more in-depth with the philosophical implications. There is some social commentary, like when discussing the all-male party of Final Fantasy XV and, rather than bemoaning the lack of representation of women in gaming, takes a moment to appreciate a game that shows male friendship, vulnerability, and connection. It’s maybe a bit generous, but nonetheless it gives some considerations for the impact of different game features.

Fight, Magic, Items is a gentle, informative non-fiction read. I’m tempted to think of it as a beach read, even. It inspires the nostalgia of childhood and a curiosity for the games I’ve missed. It gives me an appreciation for the underdog story JRPGs have had in the West and makes me really appreciate the diversity of the genre that’s out there. Guess I gotta get gaming.

Happy reading gaming reading!

In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

        I am sometimes blessed with the rare pleasure of seeing a book I hadn’t previously heard of suddenly mentioned in wildly different contexts. It feels like encouragement from the fates to pick it up, a kind of organic process of magical discovery that even the best algorithms can’t replicate. This time, the universe led me to In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. I think my initial exposure to it was in Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things, but there have been at least two or three other references or contexts (another book? the writing on an art gallery wall?) to Tanizaki’s philosophy on shadows.

Tanizaki is a true aesthete. He offers such lush, poetic descriptions of shadows but also how they manifest across different facets of Japanese culture. I myself am drawn to the alluring ambiguity of shadows, though Tanizaki also makes it a matter of national character which leads to some ideas that feel a little spurious.

I’ll start with some of the more engaging parts. Tanizaki reads almost like Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes in that he provides focused commentary on oft-overlooked elements of our culture. For instance, in an early chapter we see Tanizaki discussing the elegance of Japanese toilets. He discusses their placement in fragrant groves, where people on the toilet get lost in meditation outdoors. Elegance, he says, is frigid. He sees toilets as a most aesthetic object, where that which is unsanitary becomes elegance and an opportunity to reflect on the beauties of nature, suggesting a connection between toilets and the haiku as a poetic form. 

There’s another chapter in which he discusses the difference between lacquered dishware and porcelain. In addition to the disdain he feels towards the clinking and scraping of porcelain utensils, he also talks about the infinite depths of a lacquered bowl. He talks about Japanese soup in such bowls that appear to reflect infinite depths. When you lift the bowl to your face, you look into the cloudy darkness of the soup and it stretches on forever against the lacquered finish. Passages like that reflect also the depths of Tanizaki’s sensuality and read as a poetic philosophy.

In another area, Tanizaki describes the brightness of paper and the darkness of ink and how the technology of writing developed around flecked and tinted paper vs. bright white. He describes how the way pens developed was rooted in the relationship between light and shadow and how those pens changed the way we communicate—how the characters of different languages are shaped, ultimately, by the darkness of ink and the tools to disperse it.

I also loved the way he philosophized about polishing silver. Essentially, Tanizaki feels distaste for the shine, preferring cloudiness and jade’s shadowy surface. He elevates the idea of grime. The oils on peoples’ hands, for example, give statues polish. Grime makes things glow. It’s a reversal of how we often think about polish. 

As a broader aesthetics, Tanizaki points to the necessity of darkness to illuminate that which it enshrouds. I think there’s a lot of merit to that idea and when I consider the role of darkness in some of my favourite artworks, there is something about shining shadows.

Where Tanizaki’s philosophy loses me a little bit is when he ties things back to national character or racial traits. There are a number of unsupported generalities about Western and Japanese character. Some of the claims are interesting points of contrast. For instance, he talks about the dense gardens in Japan relative to the plain manicured lawns of the West. He talks about how in Western culture ghosts are transparent while in Japan they are footless and dark. There are a number of more spurious claims, however. For instance, he suggests that the “yellow” faces (his word) and black hair of the Japanese led to changes in the development of their culture. He also argues that “Orientals” (again, his word) are content to find pleasure in how things are, while Westerners find pleasure in what things can be—hence why the West is so replete with artificial light. He talks about the way bright lights produce heat—and don’t even get him started on the air conditioned nightmare that has taken over that renders all heating artificial.

There’s a lot to like about this sensual aesthetic philosophy. The series of short chapters and vignettes offers focused insight into different aspects of culture, and I really liked that level of phenomenological exploration. I read it with a grain of salt; I’m not sure how I would have received the book when it was originally published in 1933, but in 2026 a lot of the racial and cultural generalizations feel either dated or incomplete. I imagine, too, that with cultural influences being more widely available globally, some of the distinctions that might have previously existed are no longer as pronounced as they might have been.

If you’re also a fan of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, this book captures that same deep consideration of phenomena and bridges the worlds poetics and philosophy. It’s worth the hour or two it will take to read—despite all the shadows, it may prove illuminating.

Happy reading!

Cultish by Amanda Montell

  If there’s someone that can make linguistics cool and fun, it’s Amanda Montell. I previously read her book Wordslut, which was a fun breakdown of ‘profane’ language. Cultish retains a similar accessibility and lets Montell’s lively voice shine. It is a contemporary examination of the language games cult leaders play in order to manipulate their audience.

Montell begins the reflection essentially with what we think of as “actual” cult leaders. She gives an account of Jim Jones and the Jamestown massacre, for example. She draws on personal accounts, archival recordings, and other scholarship to explain how Jones was able to maintain such control over his adherents despite the obvious lies and contradictions. Montell describes how language operates to prevent deep consideration of ideas. For Jonestown in particular, I appreciated how Montell drew on the work of Sikivu Hutchinson to explore the narrative of how Jim Jones drew on progressive ideology to manipulate people and ultimately deploy racist stereotypes to his advantage.

There are a few elements that re-emerge across different contexts. In addition to dehumanizing ‘out groups’, Montell identifies the “us vs. them” structures that give cult adherents a sense of belonging they might not otherwise be experiencing. The us/them and in/out group mentality at the core of cults serves to elevate some at the expense of others. This also leads to ‘purity tests’ that give validity to the cult followers’ experience. At the same time, cults operate on the principle that there is always another layer of purity that adherents can never achieve.

The most memorable case study for this is scientology. For instance, in scientology (and other cult-like settings), words are given new meanings that become a kind of code to those “in the know.” Again, that is able to contribute to an in-group and an out-group. We see this in all kinds of places; different communities have their own lexicon. What is different about scientology is that if a member is found to have used a word incorrectly, they are subjected to rigorous “testing” (re-programming) until they demonstrate that they now have the accepted understanding of the word. I found that section pretty compelling because it seemed the most codified and controlled use of language of the different groups in question. 

Despite other cult-like settings not being as interventionist, necessarily, in their adherents’ use of language, there are certain patterns that emerge. One chapter of the text is focused on Multi-level Marketing schemes and another focuses on fitness crazes, like spin and Bikram yoga, and Montell highlights how formulaic their messaging can be. Montell is pretty funny in creating fake outreach messages of a woman trying to recruit for her MLM. As entertaining (and informative) as it is to explain the patterns in the #girlboss dialect, Montell is also pretty sympathetic to those folks that get duped. She highlights the research that shows how cult adherents are not necessarily ignorant but that they hold a more optimistic disposition.

One of the most useful elements of Montell’s analysis of language is her commentary on “thought-terminating clichés.” Those are all those phrases that are designed to make people stop reflecting. Statements like “it is what it is” stand out as an example that encourages people to just stop thinking. Montell touches on the Trump cult briefly, but I can’t help but think of “thought-terminating clichés” like Make America Great Again as a response to any challenge to critical thinking.

Amanda Montell is a special voice in contemporary discourse. I think she’s such an accessible writer that writes in a fun and engaging voice about contemporary issues. The topics she’s addressing are deep and academic, but are delivered with such clarity that readers are made to feel welcome within the complexity of the discourse. I think I liked Wordslut a bit better, but Cultish is more broadly applicable across contexts.

Happy reading!

The Fire People: A Collection of British Black and Asian Poetry by Lemn Sissay

Years ago, my partner encouraged me to buy the anthology The Best American Poetry 2021. I loved that collection and found in it so many resonant works. In that vein, when my partner took a trip to the U.K., she brought me back this gift: The Fire People: A Collection of British Black and Asian Poetry edited by Lemn Sissay.

The editing of this collection has, in some ways, a much broader scope in that it includes multiple poems by the same authors. For instance, Jackie Kay, Shamshad Khan, and Lemn Sissay are granted the space for four poems each, while Kadija Sesay and Koye Oyedeji have only one poem each. In other ways, the collection has a tighter focus.

A number of the poems reflect similar topics. There are a number of poems about familial and ancestral connection, food and traditions, racism and injustice, and modern culture for racialized people. For example, from a content perspective, the poem “Ajax” by Patience Agbabi, is a lengthier poem about a drug-fueled clubbing experience. From a stylistic standpoint, there’s a distinct focus on expressiveness and informality. The poems often read like slam poems or avant-garde bombasticism. For example, “CigArs & WHitE StAr LiLLys” by Mallissa Read makes use of text speak, random capitalization, and unusual spacing to push the limits of language and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Reggae fi May Ayim” offers phonetic spellings of a Jamaican accent. The collection also includes the poet Tricky, a rapper and producer whose poems have a distinct rhyming quality—the blend of music and poetry comes across pretty clearly here and elsewhere, as the collection as a whole has a generally playful voice, making use of puns and associative leaps. 

I was hoping that someone in the collection would incite in me a new poetic obsession. While there were some poets that I liked (Jackie Kay stands out in that respect), and a few stand-out pieces by a smattering of poets, I think I built the collection up in my head too much based on my experience with the American poetry collection. I liked it, but I wouldn’t say I loved it.

Regardless, it is never a bad thing to explore different parts of the world through literature and to open yourself to the possibility of connecting with other voices.

Happy reading!

The Kingdom of Surfaces by Sally Wen Mao

  If you pick The Kingdom of Surfaces off the shelf, I imagine you’ll be struck by the beauty of the cover image and that you would expect the poems housed within to be similarly ornate. Imagine my surprise, then, when I began to read Sally Wen Mao’s book and found that every poem serves as a reflection of Walter Benjamin’s quote that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The Kingdom of Surfaces offers poems both long and short that call into question the West’s engagement with China throughout history well into the present day.

In fact, an early work in the collection, “Batshit,” addresses the way China was and is portrayed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Having been born in Wuhan, Mao confronts head-on the racist tropes that emerged following the outbreak. She references the fact that “some love foreign / dogs more than foreign people” (9) and that “they call eating dog barbaric, / but not police brutality” (9). The poem immediately following, “Wet Market,” further explores the shifting meaning of barbarism with reference to cultural practice.

Throughout the collection, Mao includes concrete poems (poems in the shape of things), which seems to have fallen out of vogue with “serious” poets. Here, though, it’s a refreshing take on the genre. Rather than having a poem about cats in the shape of a cat (how cutesy!), Mao replicates the shape of Ming vases to address a history of conflict, of exploitation, and of appropriation. It’s rare to see a concrete poem that addresses such meaningful issues, elevating the form to unabashedly honour the traditions from which the poet has emerged.

This work is important precisely because Western culture aims to decontextualize artistry from its origin. The titular piece of The Kingdom of Surfaces is a sustained, surrealistic piece that draws from Alice in Wonderland and the MET Gallery. The poems in that section, spanning twenty pages, each use an epigraph pulled from the exhibit at the MET China Through the Looking Glass: Fashion, Film, Art. The quotations often make claims about the work being disconnected from its context in a kind of postmodern revelation. Specifically, part of the exhibit reads as follows, provided as the epigraph for Mao’s poem “Humpty Dumpty”:

The China that unfolds before  our eyes is a China “through the looking glass,” one that is culturally and historically decontextualized. Freed from settings, past and present, the objects in this catalogue and in the exhibition galleries begin to speak for and between themselves. A narrative space opens up that is constantly being reorganized by free association. Meanings are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated.

Each poem in the section “The Kingdom of Surfaces” offers a challenge to the MET’s perspective that art can be removed from its context. The poems offer a metacommentary on museums’ accumulation processes and the appropriation inherent in exhibit art from Chinese dynasties. The culture-jamming and satirical bent of offering these quotations as a guidepost for a poem that cleverly appropriates from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (a nice little inversion of Orientalism) is a great statement on the state of curation today.

What makes the collection really powerful, though, is that this is not simply a tirade against the forces of Western culture engaged in yet another colonial exploitation. The foundations of Mao’s culture are also troubled. Take the poem “On Silk,” for example. It’s an eight page poem about the history of the silk trade, and a number of poems in the collection reference the cultivation process of silk and boiling living creatures alive in order to harvest the culturally-coded material. “Romance of the Castle Toppler” similarly tries to grapple with the treatment of women in Chinese culture, another interrogation of a heritage which has ultimately produced beauty, as well.

The poem “Paris Syndrome” really helps to reinforce that challenging disconnect. Paris Syndrome is itself an experience of failed expectations, a medical affliction recognized among Japanese and Chinese tourists to Paris, whose experience of culture shock is so intense that it creates a sense of dis-ease, sweating, anxiety, and panic. The final stanza of the poem addresses the idea of home and what expectations the speaker’s mother had for a house. The final lines of the poem read as follows: “Before we arrived in the beautiful / country, I imagined a house / with walls made of silk. // I imagined a stranger could come up to our door / and whisper a secret through its seams” (35). It’s an evocative image, both familiar and strange. The idea of the house being made of silk is not entirely comfortable, particularly when it is troubled by the other cultural and “barbaric” layers of the silk trade. The idea of a stranger whispering a secret through the seams of the house presents as intimate a scene as it is coded with danger, an alluring danger perhaps, but a danger nonetheless.

The poem immediately after is “On Silk,” which is structured around a series of vignettes that provide glimpses of history in the silk trade and its current incarnations. Mao offers some rich imagery where the speaker narrates, “When I found the water, I debated / drinking its mirage. In the desert, / everything grew wild. I expected / an expanse of death, but everything / sprouted before me, more alive / than I could ever hope to be” (43). It’s a rich and lush kind of image that is immediately undercut by the section of the poem which follows. She notes that “Every evening in the Bund, orange light / bathed the municipal buildings as I strolled. / The cameras captured every transgression— / jaywalking or loitering. On this side of the river, / memories of blood spilled. A luxury watch brand / sells time to the rivers of people walking down / East Nanjing Road” (43). There’s a coldness to the scene. The orange light takes on an ominous quality where “every transgression” is documented. In the passage that follows, there is a dystopic depiction of the skyline “sequined / with fishscale lights, projections on buildings — / cherry blossoms, ads for skin cream, and the / words I love my home in Chinese and English” (43). The passage ends with the line “Even the sky / was a bolt of silk torn in half by God” (43). The short quatrain that concludes the poem discusses “the splendour and squalor” of their collective past. It’s an appropriate phrase for characterizing the depiction of aesthetics in across the collection: splendour and squalor interlinked, and “A worm spitting / and spinning itself into a new luxury, a sensation, / finally, yes, a thing of value” (43).

While the poems often take on a political bent, they are thoroughly infused with the personal and some of those poems really standout. There’s a viscerality to the pieces, notably in the excellent piece “American Loneliness,” where personal memories are recounted and placed within the broader framework of American and Chinese culture. There are some narratives that weave in, out, and around each other for a finely crafted experience.

As you may have noticed, Mao has a knack for striking images and some poetic phrasing. The first piece in the collection is a highlight that offered a beautiful closing line; in fact, it is what compelled me to read the rest of the collection. In describing “Loquats” (after which the poem is named), the poem concludes on a compelling paradox: “A tree so pretty and snakelike / it renders you breathless, then worthless, all at once” (4). Grappling with contradictions like awe and worthlessness before the beauty of the world is compelling, but Mao twists the knife just a little bit more. The small word “then” is in conflict with “all at once.” The experience is both sequential and simultaneous, which gives that irresolvability voice and helps to nourish the pieces which follow.

The Kingdom of Surfaces is an engaging collection. If you’re interested in history, colonialism, aesthetics, and the monuments to barbarism regularly erected in the West and beyond, it has a wealth of narratives to engage with. It’s an informative collection as much as an imagistic one, and there is enough of a personal touch to breathe life into the poems (without simply being a history textbook with line breaks). It was a surprising read, far more confrontational than I would have expected, but also sincere and appreciatory and conflicted. Sally Wen Mao offers a rich collection here worthy of deep consideration.

Happy reading!

Terrorist by John Updike

        I’m embarrassed to have read Terrorist by John Updike, and I’m more embarrassed for him having written it. It’s an unfortunate mess of a novel with an inconsistent style, an awkwardly-pace plot, and such clumsily written self-important characters, which, taken together, hardly warrant commentary. However, in an effort to spare others from reading this book, I’m going to take a lot of words to say a few simple things—in other words, I’m taking a page out of Updike’s book, since I can’t an actual 120 pages out of it.

From a plot standpoint, Terrorist is as simple as its title implies. It’s about Ahmad, a teenage boy attending high school in New Jersey in the years following the terror attacks on September 11th. At the climax of the book, it’s the five year anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers. The actual terrorism only actually happens in the last, let’s say, forty pages of this 310 sprawl. The first third of the book is about Ahmad in high school and going to see his guidance counsellor and going to watch his friend sing in Church, which itself rings so false it’s unfathomable. Ahmad speaks like a robot and hates all things fun, vocally judges all non-Muslims, and is generally unpleasant; how Joryleen remains friends with him is completely incomprehensible. 

The book then spends a lengthy period of time focused on equally implausible guidance counsellor, Jack Levy, who meets with Ahmad once right before graduation to see what his life plans are. Ahmad wants to drive a truck and Jack thinks there is something more for him out there. Ahmad says that if God wanted him to have more education he would have put him on that path. So, Jack goes to Ahmad’s house to give his mom college pamphlets—and then starts cheating on his wife with Ahmad’s mom. Now is probably a good time to mention that Updike’s treatment of Ahmad’s fundamentalism is embarrassingly simplistic: his Egyptian dad left his Irish mom, leaving him fatherless, so he turns to God as his father, whom he wants to impress. It’s a dumb Freudian piece that completely ignores the political motivations of terror movements.

Anyway, the book goes on unnecessarily long, masturbatory tangents, presumably to show how great he is at imagery. For instance, Ahmad and Joryleen are walking together, Updike give the following description of how they walk:

along the northern edge of the empty acres waiting to be developed. A painted big sign shows a four-story parking garage that will bring shoppers back to the inner city, but for two years nothing has been built, there is only the picture, more and more scribbled over. When the sun, slanting from the south above the new glass buildings downtown, comes through the clouds, a fine dust can be seen lifting from the rubble, and when the clouds return the sun becomes a white circle like a perfect hole burned through, exactly the size of the moon. Feeling the sun on one side of him makes him conscious of the warmth on the other, the warmth of Joryleen’s body moving along, a system of overlapping circles and soft parts. The bead above her nostril-wing gleams a hot pinpoint; sunlight sticks a glistening tongue into the cavity at the center of her scoop-necked blouse. He tells her, “I am a good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith.” (69)

The whole passage serves to extend the story, but not enrich it. The supposed sensuality of the passage that is meant to contrast Ahmad’s rigidity is still presented in a nearly mathematical register, so the contrast is less impactful than Updike may have thought. Also, you may have noticed the laughable dialogue of Ahmad’s explicit statement about his intentions.

The conversation between he and his friend continues in an equally laughable way. Joryleen asks, “Instead of being good, don’t you ever want to feel good?” She suggests that maybe she could go to mosque with him and he replies robotically, “That would not do. We could not sit together, and you could not attend without a course of instruction, and a demonstration of sincerity” (69). Joryleen responds, “Wow. That may be more than I have time for”—lol, first of all—”Tell me, Ahmad, what do you do for fun?” (69). Ahmad then explains how his job at the corner store can be ‘fun’ (yes he uses quotation marks) due to “observing the customers and the varieties of costume and personal craziness that American permissiveness invites. There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest” (70). Elsewhere, Ahmad argues with his mother about not having a life and says, “I have money, and I just saw a couple movies, one with Tom Cruise and one with Matt Damon. They were both about professional assassins. Shaikh Rashid is right—movies are sinful and stupid. They are foretastes of Hell” (144). His mom then accuses him of being gay, because why not? Everyone loves gay panic. Returning to the conversation between Ahmad and Joryleen, he says, “Nor does Islam forbid consorting with the opposite sex, if strict prohibitions are observed [...] They exist, the prohibitions, for the benefit less of the male than of the female. Her virginity and purity are central to her value” (70). I know that Terrorist was published in 2006, with the context of the war on terror in full force, but I can guarantee that even at the time nobody ever spoke this way and Updike’s Islamophobia is presented under the guise of having researched its tenets with all the smugness of a Fox News reporter.

The critique of Islam’s treatment of women is completely undercut by Updike’s persistent misogyny throughout the text. No woman escapes his scorn. Ahmad’s friend Joryleen, for instance, is transformed from a Church girl into a sex worker, pimped out by her boyfriend Tylenol (yes, really, that’s his name, and I can’t explain why it feels like antiblack racism, to boot). I don’t know if I wrote this in my notes, but Joryleen is eighteen and Updike discusses how her breasts are already beginning to sag, almost imperceptibly. Why mention this at all? Because Updike hates women’s bodies. Jack’s wife Beth is a particular object of Updike’s scorn. The number of references to her being fat, smelly, vapid, and lazy are truly revolting—and to be clear, it’s not she that is revolting, but Updike’s attitude towards her. Updike’s lingering in misogyny contributes to the excess that makes the plot such a slog. For instance, there’s a scene that goes on for, roughly, ten pages, maybe, of Beth trying to pick up the remote control she dropped. Let’s take a look at a passage from that scene:

She rises in stages, first pulling the lever to lower the foot-rest and, fighting the rocker motion, transferring her feet to the floor and gripping the left arm of the chair with both hands to tug herself almost up, and finally, with an audible exclamation, heaving her weight onto her braced knees, which slowly, excruciatingly straighten, while she catches her breath. At the start of the process, she thought to place the empty plate on the chair arm safely onto the side table, but she forgot the television remote in her lap, and it falls to the floor. She sees it there, the numbered buttons of its little rectangular panel down with the spots of coffee and spilled food that have accumulated over time on the pale-green carpet. Jack warned her that the carpet would show dirt, but pale wall-to-wall was in that year, the carpet salesman said. “It gives a cool, contemporary look,” he assured her. “It expands the space.” Everybody knows Orientals are best for spots blending in, but when could she and Jack ever afford an Oriental? There’s a place on Reagan Boulevard where you can get them secondhand at a bargain price, but she and Jack never go that way together, it’s where mostly blacks shop. Anyway, used, you don’t know what the previous people have spilled that’s hidden in the fibers, and the idea is distasteful, like carpets in hotel rooms. Beth can’t bear to think of turning her body around and bending over to pick up the remote—her sense of balance is getting worse with age—and there must be some urgent reason why the person on the phone doesn’t hang up. (127)

What a waste of my time. Proust can get away with taking a long time to say something short; Updike is just a dope about it. She struggled to stand up. That’s enough. All the stuff about the carpet is also so unnecessary that I can’t fathom any reason to include it—plus, again, there’s the casual antiblack racism thrown in (just for funsies, I guess?).

Beth answers the phone and her sister tells her to turn off the loud TV (Beth, of course, watches her daily soaps, with Updike’s demeaning scowl hovering over her from space). So, “Beth puts the receiver down without answering. She sounds like Mother, she thinks, plodding over to where the remote—curiously similar to the telephone in look and feel, matte black and packed with circuitry: a pair of mismatched sisters—lies on its back on the pale-green wall-to-wall” (129). The phrase “mismatched sisters” is curiously obvious, like Updike can’t stand the thought of his cleverness going unacknowledged. The passage continues to emphasize Beth’s fatness:

With a groan of effort, gripping the chair arm with one hand and reaching down with the other in an exertion that reawakens in her little-used muscles the sensation of an exercise, an arabesque penchee, learned in ballet lessons when she was eight or nine, at Miss Dimitrova’s Studio, above a cafeteria downtown on Broad Street, she retrieves the thing and points it at the television screen, where As the World Turns is winding up on Channel Seven, under a cloud of tingling, ominous music. Beth recognizes Craig and Jennifer, in heated conference, and wonders what they are saying even as she clicks them off (129). 

Again, it’s disgusting to watch Updike revel in his hatred of Beth, giving her nothing redeeming. Her entire role in the plot, incidentally, is to pass the phone over to her husband when the moment comes. Also—what’s with these tangents into where Updike delves into where she had ballet lessons? It’s irrelevant. The maximalism found in the works of Pynchon or DeLillo has no place here, in what is supposed to be a crime thriller.

I wish I could say that Beth looking for the remote ends there. But it goes on! She returns to the phone and is told that she is “panting” before she “drops her body with a grunt onto the little hard chair that came in from the kitchen table when Mark was no longer around to eat with his parents” (130). I’ll spare you the backstory of the chair that follows, but I will note that it involves a scene where she tried to sit down, missed, and fell to the floor. Jack told her she would have broken her hip if she wasn’t “so well-upholstered” (130).

It’s bad enough that Updike himself, as narrator, is so critical of his creation, but the fact that other characters are in on his misogyny is even worse. When Beth’s husband Jack is having his affair, he tells Terry that he needs to leave and she says, “Jack, you’re always rushing off. Do I have body odor or something?” and then the narrator hops in: “This is cruel, because Beth indeed does; it fills up the bed at night, a caustic exhalation from her deep creases, and adds to his nocturnal unease and dread” (159). Even Beth’s sister “has taken the place of her mother in not letting her forget how much is wrong with her. Beth has let herself, as they say, ‘go.’ A scent rises to her nostrils from the deep creases between rolls of fat, where dark pellets of sweat accumulate; in the bathtub her flesh floats around her like a set of giant bubbles, semi-liquid in their sway and sluggish buoyancy” (135). In a post-coital moment, Jack and Terry are talking about their future. Terry suggests Jack thinks her painting hobby is a crock. He replies, “Oh no. I love your painting. I love it that you have this extra dimension. Now, if Beth—” and Terry cuts in, “If Beth had any extra dimension, she’d break through the floor” (207).

Even when Updike is being positive about women (i.e. when they are sexy and giving men sex), it comes across as disgusting and fetishistic. Terry sits up in bed “so her breasts bounce free of the sheet, their top half freckled, the half with the nipple untouched by the sun no matter how many other men have put their lips and fingers there. // The Irish in her, he thinks. That’s what he loves, that’s what he can’t do without. The moxie, the defiant spark of craziness people get if they’re sat on long enough—the Irish have it, the blacks and Jews have it, but it’s died in him” (207). Elsewhere, Updike writes that she has “loveable bohemian immodesty, has pulled her side of the sheet no higher, so her breasts, white as soap where the sun never touches them, jut free for him to admire and to feel the heft of again if he desires. He loves plump, though it can get to be too much [...] When in fucking she sits on his lap, impaling herself on his erection, he feels the colors reflected from her walls flow down her sides along with his hands, her elongating, rib-filled, preening, Irish-white sides” (158). First of all: gross already (“impaled”? barf!). Then, he can’t help but, again, contrast her with Beth’s fat. He “can’t imagine her weight on his pelvis, or her legs spread far enough apart; they have run out of positions, except for the spoon, and even there her huge ass pushes him away like a jealous child in their bed” (159).---oh, and then Terry says that her breasts are “starting to droop. You should have seen them when I was eighteen. Bigger, even, and stuck straight out” (159)---this is a woman as only a man could write. And no, that’s not a compliment to Updike. He’s insulting and he’s weird, immediately after describing Beth’s breasts (when she was young) as “inverted bowls, the size for breakfast cereal, with nipples hard as a single blueberry in his mouth (159). Good god.

If I have spent an excess of time documenting Updike’s hatred of Beth and other women in the story, it is because he himself has spent more time than necessary (arguably, the necessity of any of it is zero). Why, in this book about a budding terrorist, do we spend so much time dwelling on how undesirable all of the women are? It created such a sense of disgust for me towards the author that it’s hard to take anything he has to say seriously.

And that’s a serious problem, since Updike’s characters are constantly proseletyzing. They have long monologues about their beliefs, which quickly become indistinguishable. If I had any faith in Updike as a writer or thinker. I would suggest that the similarity in the characters’ beliefs is a commentary on the precarity of classifying particular people and not others as terrorists. Since I don’t, it becomes just another way for the characters to be flat and inconsistent. Jack Levy is a miserable grump that hates how times have changed and how movies are no good anymore; we’ve already seen Ahmad’s hatred of films. The flat critique of Western culture is perhaps best met with the response, “OK Boomer.”

Let’s come back to the notion of terrorism. Ahmad is on “the straight path.” He is so pure that he makes his entire identity his faith, even expressing more certainty than his imam at the mosque. There are a few moments of symbolism that focus on his desire for purity, which again are over-the-head and on-the-nose. Ahmad wants to be a truck driver, and as he studies for his exam there is a passage that provides a lengthy (boring) description of how to ship cargo and how the cargo has to be maintained. I won’t quote the passage at length here, but it’s all about sanitation regulations and safety: “Transportation is full of dangers that Ahmad has never before contemplated. It excites him, however, to see himself—like the pilot of a 727 or the captain of a supertanker or the tiny brain of a brontosaurus—steering a great vehicle through the maze of dire possibilities to safety” (75). It’s essentially him navigating the challenges of Western society to remain safe. But, Updike botches the landing. The last sentence of the paragraph lays all the cards on the table: “He is pleased to find in the trucking regulations a concern with purity almost religious in quality” (75). The same is true later, when Ahmad is working for a furniture company and we get excessive description of ottomans that are “Wrapped in a thick transparent plastic to protect its delicate skin of tinted leather patches sewn together in an abstract six-sided pattern, the item, preowned but well preserved, is a stuffed cylinder solid enough to take a sitting man’s weight but not soft enough to support pleasantly the slippered feet of one stretched at his ease in an armchair” (192). It’s fine.

So, the book is full of disgusting and purposeless misogyny, inconsistent and illogical behaviours from characters, and interchangeable anti-American sentiments from curmudgeons both old and young. The only engaging part of the book, really, is the final thirty pages or so, and again Updike drops logic and it results in a flop.

Here’s a summary of the ending of the book. Ahmad has been recruited by his boss’ son into a terrorist plot with the blessing of his imam. The plan is that Ahmad will drive a truck rigged with an explosive into a New Jersey tunnel in the middle of traffic. There’s some weak point in the structure that will bring the tunnel down and kill a bunch of people. Meanwhile, Beth’s sister, who works for some Homeland Security dude, calls Beth and asks to talk to Jack. Remember, Jack has only met with Ahmad a couple of times. There’s no reason to believe that he would be of any help. On the day of the attack, Ahmad is driving in traffic and Jack sees him and waves and Ahmad lets him into the truck. He fears that not acknowledging him will result in Jack making a scene and then he will be intercepted before completing his mission. Why, if Homeland Security knows about this plot, they would send a burnt out high school guidance counsellor to stop it is completely implausible. You’re telling me they wouldn’t just have snipers take him out? Come on.

That being said, the last thirty pages or so is kind of interesting and suspenseful. You have these two characters trapped together in a truck, debating whether it should be blown up. Even then, the pacing is messed up. Jack reveals what happened behind the scenes: turns out that the guy who recruited Ahmad to conduct the terror plot was a CIA agent arranging a sting operation to get to some of the bigger terror players. Ahmad is just a pawn. Incidentally, the man who recruited him has been discovered by the jihadists and beheaded so the plot is supposed to be off, but they’re happy to pin the blame on Ahmad. The gambits Jack throws at Ahmad are pretty bland—when he reveals to Ahmad “I fucked your mother” it doesn’t quite have the gravitas that would really seem to impact Ahmad, who has already lost faith in his mother anyway. Jack is just full of himself. It’s only when Ahmad waves to some black children in the car in front of him and when Jack says that he wants to die that Ahmad decides he will not detonate the bomb. I appreciate dialogue-driven scenes of confinement, but by the end I was too entrenched in the implausibility of the situation to really care when Ahmad notes that he had given up his god.

Incidentally, there’s no resolution for Joryleen. When the CIA agent hires a sex worker to deflower Ahmad (against his wishes), it turns out to be Joryleen. They have an encounter where she is trying to push herself on him and he is trying to remain virginal. He asks why she is doing this work and it turns out that her boyfriend Tylenol (again: insert eyes rolling) promises her it’s only temporary. On the eve of the suicide-bombing, Ahmad is asked where his reward money should be sent for his mother. He then says he wants his money to go to Joryleen so that she can get out of the line of work she’s in. It’s really framed as a selfless Jesus moment, where he’s dying for her sins. But, because he never actually dies, the question of what happens to Joryleen is left lingering in the air.

If it isn’t clear, I don’t recommend this book. It’s garbage. It’s a real bomb. Read Hanif Kureishi or The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid instead. I’ll probably never read Updike ever again.