The Proselytizer

by D. Keith Mano

Kris Lane earns an annual salary in six figures for taping commercial voice-overs (the word "itches" alone brings him in a small fortune), but Christianity is his true calling. Extreme composure and a seductive, soothing manner belie the fanatically perverse sensibility that has driven him to extraordinary testimonials to his God: the building of a giant, illuminated cross to dominate the landscape (replete with an Ampex tape deck booming out a Bach toccata); and, most important, the seduction of a select group of women into giving their souls to God, their voices to the Church choir, and their bodies to him. (He records their religious - and sexual - behavior on index cards and film before packing them off to Brazil to do missionary work among the lepers.)

The Proselytizer generates its special strength and momentum through the author's brilliant juxtaposition of the protagonist's grotesque fanaticism with the lives of his more-or-less life-sized friends and neighbors in the town of New Faith - the ineffectual, perpetually impoverished David Smith, hopelessly faithful to his disapproving, perpetually pregnant wife Edna, and the middling-aged Lambert McKee, minister of the Church of Resurrection (originally designed to be a Primate House for the Municipal Zoo), and his pretty, young, not-very-Christian wife Chloe, whose conversion Kris takes special pains to undertake...

It begins like this:

"He waited over her. It was a full push-up. she heard the tension thrill of his toe and finger joints in the mattress springing. With hisses, some exact hydraulic stamp, his torso dipped. Toneless stomach and bosom received an intaglio of his rib cage, of the silver cross there. She breathed out. Rinds of her flat, long breasts were extruded under their armpits, excess mortar between bricks to be struck smooth by a trowel. He islanded himself on her; legs corresponded to legs at instep and knee and thigh. He lay inert. This impress of his whole weight was a ceremony. It was his dominance; gravity became sensual. His left fist, in its black leather glove, squatted on her shoulder's dome. Hesitant she asked,

"Ohhhh, Daddy. Daddy? " Hinting. "Daddy? Are you my daddy?"
"Yes," he said. " I am your father." But the rich voice mentioned, too, a tiredness. His eyes - one dark brown; one closed by the black eye patch - became both blind, scanning inward landscapes now.

"My daddy."

Genres: Novels, Literature

271 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

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

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

How D. Keith Mano’s novels have remained out of print for so long is one of the Great Unanswered Questions, along with what alien-fish live at the bottom of the ocean, and why Richard Brautigan’s novels continue being reissued. Publishers, heed the pleas of the Buried Book Club (which itself, appropriately, has become a buried institution on GR), and reissue the cracking early works of the man behind the Great American Masterpiece Take Five. This novel concerns the curious lives of minister Kris Lane, a one-eyed smooth-talker who converts faithless maidens to God by placing them on his conveyor belt of raunchy sex, and David Smith, a routinely beleaguered schmuck seeking transcendence from the conniptions of a fecund wife and the realm of unstable employment. The exuberantly oddball erotic scenes, the darkly farcical set-pieces, and the bursts of witty dialogue are among this novel’s winning features.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Please try not to send some small, relatively unimaginative, essayistic piece about deli meats or chapstick or dentists.

That’s from “Eyeshot’s Unnecessarily Long-Winded Submission Guidelines” found in the end matter of Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox. Somewhere in that book Lee Klein gets a little more long-winded about how you really would be better off not submitting anything whatsoever that might even marginally be related to dentistry. So I’ve been casually collecting instances of dentistry in the High Falutin’ High Browin’ Fiction I readin’. So far I’ve got Mano’s The Proselytizer and Hawk’s Alaskan Skin Trade. Pynchon’s rhinoplasty in V comes pretty damn close. Anyone got anything else?

What about the novel? It’s Mano’s fifth and it foreshadow’s our hero in Take Five, Simon Lynxx. Which is to say that if you are the type of reader who gets off on self-righteously hating and deploring and condemning repulsive fictional characters like Humbert Humbert, then let me introduce you to our proselytizer, Kris Lane. You could go on for pages about why Kris Lane’s method of proselytization is immoral and should not be encouraged and then we make sure that our children don’t read this novel just in case they get any ideas and/or miss the distance the omni-narrator (there is no author here) takes from his fictional characters. But now....

And the prose. The prose. I think it’s a slight step down from Harry The Goth. It’s more visual ; less explanatory ;; read with patience and let that imagination free itself. Certainly don’t miss that opening chapter ;; by which I mean, that Mano ought be included in any conversation about the prosification of sex.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proper review to come. I debated between four and five stars for this one, but felt the pure fun of the reading made up for any issues I may have with its theological "message". Anyway, some really great writing and a bona-fide page turner.