In the promised land

An apocalyptic novelist on faith,
fanaticism, and the absent god

Robert Stone looks like a vengeful Santa Claus. He has a white beard, a barrel chest, and a paunch. He calls himself an angry man who's learned to be gentle. Certainly there's a courtesy to him -- a quality of withholding judgment that contrasts with the Old Testament look of his fierce blue eyes. He says he learned from the Japanese to be yielding, a congenial stance for a novelist. He takes a seat in a dive on 55th Street and watches the parade of the unlucky up Eighth Avenue. "From here you get quite a good view," he says, and smiles. We order some beer.

Basically, all I want to ask him is: What took him so long? Jerusalem, the millennium, the claustrophobic world of the ultrareligious Jewish haredim (literally, "the fearful ones") -- a novelist's dream. Can of corn. Easy pickings. The whole literary world had been waiting for the big millennial novel, and Stone always had the power to give it to us. But he explains that the subjects he chooses to write about come from deep within his own psyche and not from the newspaper.

"I didn't set out to write a millennial novel," he says. "What I do in Damascus Gate is what I've always done. I write about betrayal. I write about love. I write about how difficult it is to be decent in the world, the compromises people have to make and that governments have to make. I write about the absent god."

He says he is fiddling with an absurdist comic novel that will be different from anything he's published before. We order more beer.

As we sit, we both feel that out there somewhere, someone in the media is preparing an attack on Stone over Damascus Gate. Commentary? The New Republic? Stone researched the book with a series of trips to Israel over a five-year period. He fell in with the NGO (non-governmental organization) crowd, which tends, like Stone, to be liberal. He admits that the Jewish settlers come off quite badly in the novel, and the Israeli government and its agents as devious and brutal. The Palestinians fare a little better. Stone is not Jewish, nor does he pretend to be an expert on Israel. He is exposed.

I bait him by mentioning Hama, the city where, in 1982, Syrian president Hafez Assad murdered 20,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why didn't he set the novel there? He laughs at me. He was around the first time these fights were fought. "I couldn't let it all worry me too much," he says. "I'm not anti-Semitic, and I'm not anti-Israeli. What I'd like to see is a peace settlement." I feel a little like the judge in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, asking Nathan Zuckerman if his books are good for the Jews, and give up. Stone's fiction is moral fiction. It asks for decency from all sides, and that's an admirable stance. Besides, he points out, the hatred between Arabs and Israelis is nothing as compared to the hatred among Israeli poets.

Stone's fame dates back to the Ken Kesey years. You can find him in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, having an attack of paranoia. For years now, he and his wife, Janice, have divided their time between Westport, Connecticut, and Key West, Florida. In Westport, they mostly keep to themselves. Stone teaches at Yale; they live on an average street along the water; his neighbors are not literary. He writes much of the day and reads a lot and goes to the pool and worries about his health. In Key West, he is a celebrity, part of the old Esquire crowd that has at one point or another consisted of fiction editor Rust Hills, Frank Conroy, Thomas McGuane, and the late publisher Seymour Lawrence. "Sometimes it's nice to get out," he says.

We have another beer and the sun begins to go down and I ask him if there's anything he hopes to do besides write. He lives a life of remarkable serenity. I mention Raymond Carver, his contemporary and fishing buddy, who died 10 years ago. I wonder if Stone is worried that time is running out.

"At 60, you never know. But I'm not hurrying, and I'm not counting the number of novels I have left. What I do is what I do. I'm going to drop dead writing, that's all I know."

He turns back to contemplating the street scene with satisfaction, and we order another beer. I don't know if he makes it up at that moment, but it's then he tells me he and his wife are seriously considering moving to New York.

-- D.T.M.

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