[In the following review, Gitlin argues that Damascus Gate is “overlong and overstuffed” with characters and subplots.]

It would be much too simple to say that a lot of Robert Stone's characters are stoned. Drugs are only their turnstiles. They get stoned, also, on going places they don't belong but can't stay away from. In six novels now, one of the major oeuvres in American letters of the past three decades, Stone is obsessed with the spiritual desperadoes, the overreachers, the uneasy riders, those who are tempted to go too far out—to madness, riches, prizes, revolution, whatever they find out too late they can't get. These zealots are seekers at the end of their dope, stoned on freedom, jumping at chances to squander everything dear in exchange for something ineffable, searching for some transcendence that will leave unbelievers sprawling in the dust. The resulting tragedies take place in a Stone Country consisting exclusively of edges—New Orleans, Vietnam, California, Central America, Mexico's West Coast, the open Atlantic. All but the last (from Outerbridge Reach) are furiously hot places, Boschian infernos where only outsiders dwell, and then only on the sufferance of the demons who diddle and drive them. The guilty and the innocent are lashed together, having been parachuted into a moral wilderness, left to deal obscurely in blasted landscapes under skies so big and empty they drive the weak to kill. It is as if Graham Greene were on street drugs, graced with a lyrical gift and a genius for dry anticlimax all at once. Stone is an ecstatic of disillusion.

There are inescapable whiffs of Conrad, too, where the goers-for-broke collide with the hangers-back, the once-tempted who are now (they hope) resistant to falling. But in Stone, when a Marlow watches aghast (and rapt) as a Kurtz slips over the edge, it has been a very long time since Marlow thought he was innocent. Zealots who have forgotten how to doubt know how to sink their claws into doubters who are not immune to zeal. The doubters are searching also, but for something they half-suspect they would not even recognize if it fell on them in the street. The doubters are half in love with easeless apocalypse. But for the grace of God, they would be seekers themselves. Indeed, they are often ex-seekers. Now they are wry devotees of ambiguity. The ex-, in Stone, are always asking Why.

In Damascus Gate, Stone's principal doubter is a jaded journalist, Christopher Lucas, author of a book on the U.S. invasion of Grenada, “an American and hence the slave of possibility.” Lucas, half-Jewish, half- (and ex-) Catholic, all Stone, was a religion major (wonderful touch!), and though it is his custom to stand “off to one side,” he is prone to feeling “pursued by unreasonable yearnings.” When the book begins, he's procrastinating on a Conde Nast travel piece, hoping instead to line up more demanding work, something that would expose “depravity and duplicity on both sides of supposedly uncompromising sacred struggles. He found such stories reassuring, an affirmation of the universal human spirit. Lucas desperately preferred almost anything to blood and soil, ancient loyalty, timeless creeds.” Enter Sonia Barnes, red-diaper baby, half-African-American, half-Jew, ex-Communist, ex-Quaker activist, ex-resident in Cuba, now a Sufi and a jazz singer. (“Something cool,” is the first lyric Lucas hears her sing. “I'd like to order something cool.”) Like Lucas, but from the other side, Sonia “required the proximity of faith.” They are bound to fall for each other, though violins do not play. Lucas's opposite number is Janusz Zimmer, Polish journalist, also an ex-Communist, working the Gaza Strip beat. Zimmer had also been a visitor to Grenada, “just before” and “soon after” the invasion. Zimmer is so dry he could draw water out of the Negev. At one point Lucas observes that Zimmer “was being contemptuous, but could not be sure.” Enter also Nuala Rice, an Irishwoman with strong Palestinian sympathies whose International Children's Foundation, working in Gaza, has also engaged Sonia's labors.

Lucas determines to collaborate on a book about people who suffer, and exult, from the Jerusalem Syndrome, the belief (once they set foot in the Holy Land) that they are authentic prophets or messiahs reborn. (“So you're another guy after religious nuts?” Sonia asks him. “That's old, man.” “I'm not a put-down artist,” Lucas assures her, “and I don't go for the obvious.”) Lucas's partner in writing is Dr. Pinchas Obermann, a shrink specializing in zealots, including, once, Willie Ludlum, based on the real-life Australian shepherd who torched the Al Aksa mosque in the belief that Jesus would come back faster if the former Mount Moriah were religiously cleansed of Islamic shrines. Such fancies persist, extremity of vision being the commonplace of the Jerusalem Syndrome project. One place that will attract Lucas's attention is the fundamentalist House of the Galilean, where millennial Christian fantasies dovetail with terrorist designs. He will intersect with Raziel Melker, son of a Congressman, musician, ex-yeshiva student, ex-Jew for Jesus, ex-Zen monk, an off-again-on-again junkie turned cabalist who “always wanted more. To be apostate and messiah and Mingus too.” Raziel, whose well-placed parents have sent him to Jerusalem to chill out, has attached himself to Adam De Kuff, an elderly, maladroit Christian convert whom he meets in the waiting room of their common shrink, Dr. Obermann. De Kuff, bipolar, given to long silences, is a reluctant messiah, but becomes convinced he is the real thing, bringing the news that all the false messiahs were distractions and that he is destined to lead. By the nose is how some of his followers lead him.

In Jerusalem, loose people converge like misshapen iron filings drawn to the same magnet, as at a reggae bar full of “Viking quasi-maidens, Ethiopians with Malcolm X hats, Romanian pickpockets and American Juniors Abroad in kibbutznik hats. Each boogied according to his covenant.” Stone's Jerusalem is home to the deranged and to “competing moralizers,” where the zealots are drunk on portents, and so of course they migrate to the Place of Places, where the sky is a “rich, indifferent blue, the first and holiest of unresponding skies,” “every sultry breeze [is] infested with prayer” and 64every crossroads labor[s] under its own curse.” Messianic promises are even more common than apostasy. Even a group of Japanese pilgrims reminds Lucas of Nagasaki, once “the most Christian of Japan's cities,” where “all through the war, the Japanese had thought the Americans spared it air raids for that reason.” The very stones seem ready to rapture into the heavens, and crazies migrate to stare wild-eyed into the butt-end of history, or explode somebody else's Holy of Holies to bring on the end-time:

Each year, it seemed, the equinoctial moon inspired stranger and stranger doings, usually vaguely Pentecostal in spirit, the spontaneous outpourings of many lands. Once, to be a Protestant had meant to be a decent Yankee schoolmarm or kindly clerical milord. No longer. There had commenced a regular Easter Parade, replete with odd headgear. Anglophone crazies bearing monster sandwich boards screeched empty-eyed into megaphones. Entire platoons of costumed Latin Cristos, dripping blood both real and simulated, appeared on the Via Dolorosa, while their wives and girlfriends sang in tongues or went into convulsions.

Even in the more secular Tel Aviv, conspiracies abound. The very cafes are thick with them. In the midst of the general mishegoss, the crazies have as many reasons as they have covenants. A minor-league gambler (a card-counter at blackjack) turns out to be a numerologist obsessed with variations on the number 36, and casts a spell “which he had had frequent occasions to use against various officials and auditors in the Southern District of New York.” One fanatic sect-founder is a Jewish junior-college political science professor and football coach “who had grown up in an anti-Semitic New England town and lived a secular life. … He had come to the Apocalypse through his readings of Scripture, the agrarian pessimism of Wendell Berry and the predestinarian poetry of Larry Woiwode. The history of Israel, he felt, provided evidence of divine election and the human depravity from which only God's choice could rescue humankind.” He is, one rightly suspects, destined to play a role in the plot more comic than tragic, though barely.

If the tangle of Stone's major characters sounds intricate, it is, and then some. This is Stone's longest novel, and it is overlong and overstuffed, the action often oddly slack. Shake the likes of his whole sick crew and bake them in the Middle East oven, send them on criminal missions into the Gaza Strip, expose them to angry Palestinians and millenarian settlers, and Damascus Gate ought to be superb. It has Stone's characteristic lizard eye for human tension and pretension. It has the morally pained point of view, than which nothing could be more apposite for Israel and Palestine. But the intricacy comes at a steep price. Stone's largest population of characters is too dense, too much a cobbler of bad apples. The plots are so thickly knitted together with counterplots, the intelligence agents with counterintelligence, it gets hard to keep them alive in the mind. As character after character maneuvers, masks slip away and reversals come too frequently. Perhaps because there is so much plotting—in both senses—at work, the mild acid of Stone's prose is at times weaker than usual. Forward motion stalls. Stone's characteristic grace notes are here, but muted, perhaps in the interest of motion that proves difficult to sustain. For all the quasi-biblical raptures, lightning does not strike.

There is nothing nearly as vivid as the desperate snowy zonk-out of Outerbridge Reach, comparable in its intensity to the transports of Hans Castorp in the great “Snow” chapter of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Here, Stone's passionate intensities clog up.

Still, Stone's fascination with moral collisions and pirouettes shines through Damascus Gate, and the rewards, sentence by sentence, are frequent. His newfound Balzacian relish for multifarious character extends this time even to women. Most gratifying, more strongly than in previous novels, there's a comic aspect that gets as close to redemption as Stone will allow. As demented Jewish settlers and Palestinian villagers “entertain each other,” so do Stone's crazies. In Damascus Gate, Stone Country has the unexpected virtue of finding in Israel/Palestine the shtick each party sorely needs. All seekers of Revelation and jihad will be equally offended—no small tribute.