Horn

by D. Keith Mano

Mano's narrator is Calvin Beecher Pratt, a timid, fat, white Episcopal priest who leaves a cloistered, scholarly life to take over a crumbling empty church in the imagined Harlem of the 1970s. There Pratt becomes inextricably involved with an anti-white Negro organization called the Horn Power Movement and its dynamic but tormented leader, George Horn Smith. Middleweight champion of the world, orator, professed illiterate and economic genius, Smith is a man possessed of a freakish protuberance—an eleven-inch horn jutting from his forehead.

Genres: Novels, Fiction

337 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

D. (David) Keith Mano graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University in 1963. He spent the next year as a Kellett Fellow in English at Clare College, Cambridge, and toured as an actor with the Marlowe Society of England. He came back to America in 1964 as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Columbia. He has appeared in several off-Broadway productions and toured with the National Shakespeare Company. Mano married Jo Margaret McArthur on 3 August 1964, and they had two children before their divorce in 1979. Mano left the Episcopal church for the Eastern Orthodox in 1979. He lived, until his death in September 2016, in Manhattan with his second wife, actress Laurie Kennedy.

Mano's nine novels emphasize religious and ethical themes and focus on contemporary issues seen from the point of view of a conservative Episcopalian. The novels are rich with comic action and written in an energetic style that occasionally caves in on itself from too much straining for effect.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Does a white male author with conservative political and theological leanings sending a white priest into Black=control’d (Horn Power!) Harlem seething with race=hatred make you nervous? Don’t be (nervous). Does a white male author writing a loosely veil’d Malcolm X/Elijah Muhammad make you nervous? Don’t be (nervous). What comes under indictment is not race=hatred. That would be too easy. What Mano is after is a certain tendency in 20th century liberal theology which wants to make Love is the Answer the be all end all of Christian experience, eviscerating its core. Sure, bigotry flows through all of Mano’s books like background radiation and bursts into full glory in Take Five.

Mano’s second novel is a slight improvement over his first, Bishop’s Progress. But it still suffers from the first person narrator, this time supplemented with extracts from Horn’s autobiography. There’s more at stake here too, given that we’ve all pretty much accepted the God of (Modern/Medical, cf that first novel) Progress but we still live with this racist political/theological/personal situation. Faith is still not the answer ; faith remains the task and question as it always does in Mano (answers are technology, aren’t they?). And as always with Mano, fore=shadow of Take Five. (Read Take Five today!)

For those who want Mano’s visceral and unpleasant formulation of his core of Christian theology, proceed to his next book, War is Heaven. If you are looking for a Mano-fix post-Take Five, take the next step into The Death and Life of Harry Goth.

Why is Mano not read today or ever? Because we all know about priests and organized religion and how these things are the cause of all our problems. So why would we read a novel with a priest as protagonist which might suggest something different to our know=betterism?



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A review from Time:

"HORN by D. Keith Mano. 337 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $5.95.

If Dante were alive today, he might well add another circle in the lower depths of his Inferno. Inhabiting this new pit of horror would be the warring Negro leaders of Harlem and the meddling white man who tries to understand them. It is just such a journey into hell that D. Keith Mano, a white author, describes with Dantesque fervor in his second novel, Horn.

Mano's narrator is Calvin Beecher Pratt, a timid, fat, white Episcopal priest who leaves a cloistered, scholarly life to take over a crumbling empty church in..."

Time Magazine
Books: A Core of Fear
Friday, Apr. 18, 1969

Should anyone have a Time subscription, I'd much appreciate the full text of this review.


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This book has no reviews. Thusly have I most competently acquired a 1st/1st for myself for the grand sum of $2.50 plus PA tax.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second novel by underread and un-republished (at the time of writing) writer of riveting out-of-print novels has been reviewed with exquisiteness by our very own Nathan Gaddis (no relation), making this reviewer’s impressions redundant. I suggest for your own sake, and the sake of everything you hold in the merest or sheerest regard, that you approach that unstarred review and hurl likes towards that review like a semi-demented frisbeeist losing their freaking rag (or frisbee).

[Virginia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very compelling novel. Mano uses (I assume intentionally) controversial rhetoric to keep the reader interested, but then brings it home with a revelation of a somewhat more conventional sort, the reasoning for which seems sound enough.

Artistically (and more importantly), Mano's prose is highly effective at communicating a very full range of emotions, but especially horror and humor.

The largest weakness of the novel is that Mano sometimes explains his metaphors too clearly. For instance, at one point, the protagonist is manipulating a roach's movements, and then eventually lets it escape. In context, this is a clear metaphor for the protagonist's situation; however, the parallels are then explicitly spelled out, which is totally unnecessary.

I recommend this to anyone who'd like to read an unconventional but accessible postmodern novel.