[In the following review, Gardner provides a favorable assessment of Damascus Gate but notes shortcomings in the novel's lackluster protagonist and stereotyped characters.]

Robert Stone is surprisingly intelligent for a novelist. And what, the reader will ask, is that supposed to mean? In general, we expect our novelists to feel things rather than to know them. In practice, however, aside from those who endorse the hokey notion that you must write only about your own experiences, authors who evolve beyond the coming-of-age first novel must acquire new and special information about each subject to which they turn their attention. And yet most of these, even the best, are clearly faking it. When this is not the case, they tend to fall into the opposing trap of sounding like professors posing as novelists, because the knowledge they present, though extensive, has been imperfectly assimilated into fiction.

In Damascus Gate, by contrast, Stone reveals himself to be both learned and shrewd. Whether his subject is the syncretic kabbalism of Pico della Mirandola, the music of Fats Waller, or cigarette consumption in an Israeli bar, he always gets it right, knowing just enough more than his reader to have something worth telling him, but incorporating this knowledge so seamlessly into the fabric of his work that it is never irksome. He has a very sharp eye, not so much for visual or psychological detail as for social mores. He is not a poet or a psychologist, but a journalist, an upscale, intellectualized Tom Wolfe. He does not expand the perceptions of his age, as Don DeLillo presumes to do: he is content to observe the world with the rest of us, only with greater vigor and justice.

Like Stone himself, Chris Lucas, the half-Jewish, half-Christian protagonist of Damascus Gate, is a journalist and an observer who is only half-heartedly sucked into the feverish action generated by everyone around him. He is the stillness in the eye of the religious whirlwind that is the real force of the book, the messianic movement around Adam De Kuff and the attempt by Raziel Melker to blow up the Temple Mount. Lucas is the by-now standard figure of the blocked writer in mid-life crisis. Having come to Jerusalem vaguely to write an article for a tony American magazine, he shifts gears to write a book about religion.

But out of his centrality emerges the first and potentially largest flaw of the novel. Though Lucas is fairly well fleshed out as a character, embodying the sorts of “issues” that people in novels nowadays tend to embody, he is a little too pallid to loom so large. It is the convention of classical drama for the protagonist to occupy a position of extremity and for the minor characters to council caution and good sense. Nineteenth-century literature reverses this with the figure of the “superfluous man.” Mr. Stone's novel falls somewhere in the middle and suffers for it.

His characters are convincing without being especially compelling. In a general way, Stone seems, like so many other novelists today, to be almost afraid of his creations. He refuses to instill them with a real and vigorous sense of life. He will provide them with attributes as needed, but they never take off as living things magically independent of their creator. Stone is too good at his job to make them anything other than clever and complicated and cute. But that real sense of character, that power of great literary art to conjure living souls, like golems, out of mere words, to create souls that survive after the book has been finished and shut, is not so much beyond Stone's abilities as beyond his ambitions. Whereas he sees his characters as eccentrics pretending to be stereotypes, they turn out in the end to be stereotypes posing as eccentrics, highly burnished and cannily rendered, and allowed the occasional length of leash. But they are stereotypes all the same: Sonia, the leftist sympathizer; Melker, the fanatical Jew for Jesus; De Kuff, who is or is not the reborn Messiah.

From the perspective of literature, in fact, there is something almost refreshingly unambitious about Damascus Gate. Among the heavy hitters of contemporary American fiction, Stone is perhaps the least taxing to read. There is absolutely no experimentation here: no second-person-singular narration, no present tense for past, none of the incontinent prolixity that requires Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, as a point of intellectual honor, to flirt with a thousand pages. Eschewing the breathy faux-numinous tone of much contemporary fiction, Stone recalls, in a pared-down way, the Sixties journalism of Norman Mailer.

Furthermore, despite their well-crafted eccentricities, Mr. Stone's characters have easily graspable identities that unfold at the appropriate pace. Indeed, there is, formally at least, a peculiar conservatism to Damascus Gate. It has the immediate readability of Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. One might criticize Stone for relying more on dialogue than on narrative and for being sluggish about bringing together the disparate strands of his novel in the first third of the book. But soon the novel takes off with the attempted bombing of the Temple Mount, and all is brought to a satisfying conclusion.

The real ambitions of Damascus Gate are of a spiritual order. Terms like “New Age,” “millennial,” and “postmodern” appear in the flap copy, in the ads, and, therefore, in most of the reviews. Like Durrell's Alexandria and Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg, Stone's Jerusalem is as much a character in the novel as are the creatures of flesh and blood. Chris Lucas is writing a book about something called the “Jerusalem Syndrome,” the tendency of even nonreligious types like Lucas himself to be irresistibly drawn to religion once they enter the walls of the ancient city. We are encouraged to believe that Jerusalem is the center of the universe. Though one of the oldest cities in the world, in Stone's estimation it emerges, both through its cosmopolitan mix of cultures and creeds and through its lethal blurring of pre-modern conflicts and post-modern weaponry, as the hippest place on the planet.

Certain reviewers have taken issue with Stone for not appreciating sufficiently the difference between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli border guards. In fact, Damascus Gate is characterized less by moral equivalence than by enthusiastic embrace of a luminous spiritualism, a higher, deeper calm and well-being that transcends such petty conflicts. Damascus Gate, whose very title is suggestive of Pauline revelation, seems to suggest that human civilization is on the brink of some nuclear or environmental Armageddon, and that the associated tribulations will have about them the cleansing effects of purgatorial fire. One day all this millenarian talk may well condemn Damascus Gate to the ranks of a period piece: the way people used to talk in the 1990s. For the time being, however, it offers the reader an often compelling and rewarding experience.