American Taliban

By Pearl Abraham
Random House, $25.00, 258 pages

This is an evocative and very disturbing journey through the evolution of a brilliant but unbalanced mind. To a religious skeptic, the only point of view from which I can approach this work, the essential vulnerability of the protagonist is a gaping hole in his existential grasp of the world. His Achilles’ heel is spirituality, an open-minded contemplation, at the core of his intellectual development.

“So I’m right,” Yousef said. “Your problem isn’t sex, just submission. American men aren’t used to that, but they can learn …”

Pearl Abraham has crafted a work that grips at one’s heart like talons. Her ability to represent points of view as diverse as a DC lawyer’s and a Pashtun tribesman’s are remarkable. And this deeply grounded writer’s ability to follow the development of a longing mind through the embrace of an alien fundamentalism, the transition from heterosexual to bisexual orientation, his divorcement from his support base, is an entrancing capability.

Beginning in the multi-boarding culture of the athletic young, privileged John Jude transitions from surf riding and a wriggly surfer-girl lover to Arabic studies in New York, to Arabic and Pashto immersion in Islamabad, to military training for the Taliban, and submissive homosexual sex before he disappears into the chaos of post-9/11 Afghanistan. Segueing thereafter to his liberal mother’s anxiety and contemplation of the civil liberties problems surrounding the Bush administration’s legal tactics, this novel dips into commentary without losing its piquancy.

Whatever your political, spiritual, or philosophical stance, this is a book well worth reading and elements of it will haunt your dreams for years.

Reviewed by David Sutton