__S T O N E__B O M B S__I N___jerusalem

IN "DAMASCUS GATE," ACCOMPLISHED NOVELIST ROBERT STONE SUCCUMBS TO THE LURID BLANDISHMENTS OF FORMULA FICTION.
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BY ROBERT ALTER

This novel about cultists, lunatic messianists, political conspirators and terrorists in contemporary Jerusalem vividly demonstrates how even an accomplished novelist may succumb to the seductions of formula fiction. When that happens, the novel, however serious its aspirations, cannot provide insight into politics and culture, not to speak of the life of the spirit.

Robert Stone is, of course, a seasoned professional, and the procedure he follows is transparent: Research your subject thoroughly (though I shall return to some questionable results of the research); stock the book with bizarre, exotic and mysterious characters doing dangerous things, with a spice of romantic intrigue; build lots of suspense and violence into the plot -- and you have your proverbial page-turner. It is also important to keep things simple in regard to syntax, style and even typography. Many pages are made up of paragraphs of no more than two or three lines. Sentences of a dozen words or fewer tend to predominate. The prose on the whole seeks to be merely efficient.

Here, for example, is Stone's protagonist Lucas, an American freelance journalist living in Jerusalem, getting an answering-machine rebuff from the black half-Jewish American woman with whom he is in love:

"Lucas held the phone against his chest to reject her message. Eight stories below him, an occasional vehicle sped headlong through the half-deserted streets. He felt like crying out in shame and pain. She was out of her mind, in the clutches of lunatics, and he was not man enough to save her."

This small specimen illustrates one major limitation of formula fiction. With language like this, compounded of clichés ("an occasional vehicle sped headlong through the half-deserted streets"), banalities ("He felt like crying out in shame and pain") and unnuanced simplicities ("She was out of her mind ... and he was not man enough to save her"), you cannot invest the characters with any sort of credible psychology, and without much psychological dimension in the principal actors, the page-turning suspense, deployed over 500 pages, becomes mechanical, actually a little tedious.

A great idea for a novel gets lost in all this. Jerusalem, as anyone who has lived in the city for a while can attest, is surely one of the world capitals of spiritual intensity and religious dementia of nearly every imaginable variety. If you situate yourself in the right place in or near the Old City, you may hear in a single auditory rush the nasal whine of the muezzin (amplified from a tape), the clangor of church-bells, the cacophonous half-shouted, half-chanted prayer of the ultra-Orthodox; and there are often visible signs, from angry posters to hot-eyed demonstrations, that each faith and each sectarian subdivision is ready to anathematize and, if need be, stone all the others. I think, then, that Robert Stone has hit on a promising subject in inventing a small group of followers, some Jewish, some Christian and some in between, who have attached themselves to a vaguely messianic figure from New Orleans named De Kuff and his young, heroin-addicted, jazz-playing publicist and manipulator (the two figures are transparently modeled on the 17th century pseudo-messiah, Sabbetai Zevi, and his young self-appointed prophet, Nathan of Gaza). It is also not a bad idea to have the journalist Lucas work on a book about a so-called Jerusalem Syndrome, manifested at its loony extreme in De Kuff and his disciples. But Stone's impulse to tie in the millenarianism with the skein of the suspense plot by implicating the messianists with an entirely different political group plotting to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount has the effect of reducing his report from the religious front to mere hokiness. A more pervasive problem is that his grasp of religion and politics and the local place and culture is limited to surface gestures, and even those are not altogether accurate.

This sort of novel depends on the author's winning the trust of his readers through his insider's knowingness about the represented world. Thus, Stone peppers his story with Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic terms, and with allusions to the distinctive lore of the place, adding dollops of cabalistic doctrine chiefly culled from the writings of Gershom Scholem. A good number of these references are authentic enough, but he gets things wrong with sufficient frequency to suggest that it is all worked-up, and ultimately fake. Here are a few representative instances. The Israeli slang term for Jews of German origin is Yekkes, not tekkes. (To imagine how risible this would seem to an Israeli, think of a purportedly authentic French novel about the American South in which New Englanders were repeatedly referred to as Tankees.) The Yiddish idiom for old wives' tales is bubbe meises, not bubbe meinses. The numerical value of the Hebrew letter kuf is 100, not 19. The cabalistic term tzimtzum means only "contraction," never "expansion and contraction." Nobody in Israel refers to Tel Aviv (the initials are of course T.A.) as "T.V." -- nor to Jerusalem, in another move to jazz up the dialogue, as "J-town." The prohibited extramural altars of biblical times are called bammot in Hebrew, not hammot. And it requires only a glance at Genesis 21, without any proficiency in Hebrew, to know that Hagar was not fed by ravens in the wilderness (Elijah was the recipient of that benefaction) but rather discovered a well there.

The plot and the characters, purportedly representative of urgent contemporary issues in the Holy Land, are no more credible than these details of local life. Everything is tricked out in garish fluorescent colors. The dialogue is so self-consciously and implausibly zippy that at times you can almost hear the characters snapping their fingers in rhythm as they talk. A young Chinese-American woman employed by the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, hearing of the bomb plot, is supposed to address Lucas in the following fashion:

"I lost an old roomie -- my sorority sister -- in the explosion in Riyadh. She went back to Iowa in sections. When I hear the sacred boom, I'm one step ahead of the mob of martyrs. My English will desert me. I know the exact distance to the nearest kosher Chinese restaurant and how long it takes to cover it in heels, and that's where you'll find me. Selling noodles."

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