SOURCE: Gardner, James. “Apocalypse Now.” National Review 50, no. 10 (1 June 1998): 53-4.

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...