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Inventing a terrorist conspiracy and then setting it in contemporary Jerusalem may seem a coals-to-Newcastle sort of enterprise. Why bother with make-believe when the reality is so vivid and convoluted? Robert Stone provides an engrossing answer in his sixth novel, Damascus Gate (Houghton Mifflin; 500 pages; $26). All of Stone's previous fiction has featured heroes whose problems are implicitly religious. Their pathologies--the heavy ingestion of drugs and booze, the habit of seeking or stumbling into serious, life-threatening trouble--stem from their uneasy sense that God still exists, but not for them. Damascus Gate makes...
...American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin) The title is ironic--a Philip Roth specialty. There is precious little rural peace and harmony in this scorching novel about a prosperous New Jersey couple whose good life is destroyed when their daughter becomes a '60s terrorist. In Roth's earlier novels, parents tended toward the comic and repressive. Not here. The author renders the Job-like suffering of a father and mother over a lost child with characteristic emotional force and verbal energy...
...view here is, forget that asterisk. With the publication of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (Houghton Mifflin; 190 pages; $23), a collection of novellas about men and women in nature, there should be no more avoiding plain truth: Rick Bass is a very good writer of fiction. What's more, he's good at a kind of writing that is often done with irritating self-consciousness. Bringing the natural world into a story as something more than scenery invites a rich array of overdelicate word-painting and drum-roll weather effects, with turning seasons or the death and birth...
...strokes. While a smattering of books have attempted to redress this problem, among them Jill Nelson's 1993 memoir, Volunteer Slavery, the lives of these women beg for further elaboration. Happily, Nelson's new memoir, Straight, No Chaser (Putnam; 225 pages; $23.95), and Gwendolyn M. Parker's Trespassing (Houghton Mifflin; 209 pages; $23) provide some of the missing detail...
Novels do not ordinarily dabble with too much exactitude in current events or upcoming headlines; fiction writers hope, after all, that their work will outlast the rapid stream of passing fancies. But Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong (Houghton Mifflin; 243 pages; $23) arrives as a noteworthy exception to that rule. On June 30 Britain will end its long-term ownership and control of Hong Kong and hand over the colony to the People's Republic of China. Hot off the presses, Kowloon Tong offers Theroux's imaginative version of how some Hong Kong residents have fared--and will fare...