SOURCE: Saunders, Mark. “From New Orleans to Jerusalem.” Sewanee Review 107, no. 3 (summer 1999): xc-xci.

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...