MILLICENT BELL
Fiction Chronicle
DAMASCUS
GATE.
By Robert Stone. Houghton Mifllin. $26.00.
THE
HALF- LIFE OF HApPINESS.
By John Casey. Knopf. $25.00.
THE
POISONWOOD BmLE.
By Barbara Kingsolver. Harper Flamingo. $26.00.
THE
READER.
By Bernhard Schlink. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway.
Pantheon. $21.00.
RESERVATION ROAD.
By John Burnham Schwartz. Knopf. $24.00.
There are the novelists who cannot give us enough of life; they cram down
our throats more than we can easily swallow, and we nearly choke on a mass
of characters and scenes and intertangled plots, and on the macro-history
of social movements, politics, war, revolution and economic change, as well
as the micro-history of souls. They demand that we take into ourselves a
whole potful of reality because this, they urge, is the only way to under–
stand what happens. And there are novelists who elect to serve the small
sample, or the distilled essence of individual relationships-just that. The
writers of this second kind also claim to give us the knowledge that will
explain our lives; everything we need to know is contained in the story of
how a few persons feel about one another, they seem to say-all of history
in the larger world is implied in a spoonful.
A novel of the first kind is Robert Stone's
Damascus Gate.
At its center
there is one man, an itinerant American journalist named Christopher
Lucas, who finds himself between assignments in Jerusalem in the early
1990s. He is, by profession as well as personali ty, an observer rather than an
actor, and so he plays a role useful to the structure of novels: he is the wit–
ness whose efforts to understand his surroundings become the reader's own
struggle to understand the book. Such a central consciousness has emerged
in previous novels by Stone--Lucas resembles John Converse in
Dog Soldiers
(1973), Frank Holiwell in
A Flagfor Sunrise
(1981), and Owen Browne in
Outerbridge Reach
(1992). But in this latest work, the recording persona who
has witnessed trauma and conflict in other parts of the world is immersed
in a place where no one remains for long unparticipant. Lucas himself is not
a dedicated partisan of any faith or nationality or cause. He is a lapsed
Catholic whose father was a Jew; he is a
mischling
who answers wi th embar–
rassed hesitation the repeated Israeli question, "Are you Jewish?" He lacks
