[In the following review, Saunders offers praise for both Stone's ability to tie up loose plot threads in Damascus Gate and for clearly delineating a large cast of characters in a political thriller.]

On first inspection Robert Stone's six novels don't fit the broken mold of postmodern experiment and obsession with American popular culture that marks his contemporaries. After his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1966), which depicts, in terms at once realistic and satiric, a New Orleans mad with racial strife, Stone put himself and his characters—mostly lapsed Catholics possessed of a fervent gnosticism—in the way of some of the more volatile overseas conflicts of the last thirty years. In the manner of Hemingway and Greene he disciplined his ambition through plot, even as a carnival vein always seemed at the point of disturbing the limpid surface of his prose. Following his master, Joseph Conrad, whose characters stood at the margins of European empire, Stone sent his lost Americans abroad to understand his home country more clearly.

Stone's continuous struggle to write a so-called thriller that is really a novel of ideas unleashes an idiom that is at once hip and richly descriptive, surreal, transcendent. Read in light of its structural tensions and psychedelic tone, Stone's work seems closer to Pynchon and DeLillo—or the Gershwins and Jerry Garcia—composers who incorporate the various riffs of the postwar United States. Damascus Gate, Stone's monumental grappling with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adds a sacred Oriental strain to his uniquely American music.

While the novel's setting may suggest otherwise, its central plot to bomb the Temple Mount and usher in Armageddon is, as one representatively colorful character puts it, “an American story.” And, if a millennial thriller informed by the mystical traditions of Kabbalah and Sufism seems a project too dangerously perfect for a writer whose characters take God's apparent withdrawal so personally, fear not: there's a humor here, a gentleness toward his creations that feels like wisdom rather than judgment. This generosity yields Stone's most sympathetic protagonist—the freelance journalist Christopher Lucas. Lucas travels to Israel in the grip of a virulent midlife crisis “to cure himself” of a “fond, silly regard for religion” left over from his days in a Catholic boys' school, and finds himself choosing between two equally ominous stories to cover. Cut from the same cloth—half tie-dye, half hair-shirt—as Stone's earlier leading men, Lucas is a liberal with a divided provenance—the bastard son of a Jewish professor and a Catholic singer—who fears choosing either political commitment or faith: “Lucas desperately preferred almost anything to blood and soil, ancient loyalty, timeless creeds.” He is, in Stone's terms, a typical American, a “slave of possibility” who can't figure out if he's a cynic or a seeker, but knows he wants a good story anyway.

In spite of his impotence—temperamental and otherwise—Lucas does fall in love, with Sonia Barnes, a beautiful mixed-race Sufi jazz singer who is falling under the spell of a dubious guru, a wealthy, manic-depressive Jew from New Orleans called Adam De Kuff. De Kuff's election as messiah is promoted, in a manner somewhere between revelation and public relations, by Ralph (or Raziel) Melker, a spoiled prodigy, musician, and junkie from a prosperous Michigan Zionist family. Lucas, who is writing a book on religious fanatics, can't quite decide if Razz Melker is a mystic, charlatan, or madman. When Razz starts “using” again, his rationale offers an astonishingly clear window on the allure of drugs, their false promise of spiritual insight. He makes Stone's penchant for drug-popping characters seem organic, much more than a crutch. In Razz, Sonia, and a huge supporting cast of brilliantly drawn international-aid workers, gonzo journalists, intelligence operatives, evangelists, and shrinks, we see how a misguided conflation of political engagement and religious faith, often a symptom of mental instability, feeds political opportunists.

This unholy union of innocence and exploitation begat A Hall of Mirrors and the grim circus that formed its conclusion. Stone's books that take place in the seventies, in Vietnam and Central America, were products of their times, full of black humor and irony but earnest and tragic at heart. In his last novel, Outerbridge Reach (1992), the publicity surrounding a sailing race fed on a man's best dream of himself, destroying him as if his mildly mercenary romanticism were all the 1980s could supply in the way of a tragic hero. In Damascus Gate Stone is not afraid to let his tragedy shade into farce, to paint his Razz and Adam De Kuff as a band of Merry Pranksters trying to usher in the millennium with Lucas as witty everyman and Sonia as femme fatale. The ending, a cinematic chase across the Old City rooftops, is a comic sequence of great ingenuity in which what counts is the performances the bomb plot engenders—and the political box office made by the show. That it manages to tie up the strands of a labyrinthine plot while exposing the theatrical politics of late twentieth-century fundamentalist terror is well nigh a miracle.

Damascus Gate is the best testimony yet to the talent and encompassing vision of an American writer who, like his secret sharer Melville, went looking for himself in the Holy Land.