Lost Worlds

By Martha Duffy

THE BRIDGE

by D. KEITH MANO

240 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

It is not much of a favor to either writer to say that D. Keith Mano is a kind of male Joyce Carol Gates, but there are some similarities. Both novelists are young, ambitious, notably prolific, and serious about the novel as an art form. Both enjoy literary reputations that crackle along in the streets like San Francisco cable lines when no car is in sight.

The Bridge is Mano's sixth novel in five years. None of his books has been more than modestly popular, but from the start he has had brilliant success with critics. An author is of course not accountable for the praise he attracts. After a while, though, it becomes questionable whether reviewers do a young writer good--Mano is 31--to compare him with the likes of Kierkegaard and Evelyn Waugh. Mano is still a writer of more promise than achievement. His strengths are energy, earnestness and a tough intelligence. But he is a stiff writer, not especially imaginative, and his overdrawn characters tend to be mere mouthpieces for ideas.

Part of Mano's success may stem from a frankly religious outlook. In these cynical, pragmatic times, nearly everyone is eager to admire religious faith--particularly if it is someone else's. Mano, an Episcopalian, is a specifically Christian novelist. In his books, God is a respected familiar; eternity is a definite place on the map. There is always an old-fashioned metaphysical confrontation. In his first novel, Bishop's Progress, the bishop and a surgeon angrily reshuffle old arguments about Christian charity. In Horn, a priest and a black leader dispute ethics. Now, in the new book, a fashionable venture into futurism, the author yokes a world-weary priest and a profane Noah who repopulated a ravaged world.

The Bridge is set in New York State a millennium hence, with a prologue and epilogue that occur 600 years beyond that. These short sections show a society struggling back to some kind of sufficiency after the human race has committed mass suicide during the Age of Ecology. Though comfort is meager and government insanely harsh, man is glorified as the Lord of Creation. The great annual holiday is called the Feast of Eater, honoring the legendary hero who long ago defied the order to kill himself. His name--no name is too obvious for Mano--was Dominick Priest.

The rest of the book tells Priest's story as reconstructed by one of his descendants. Mano now plunges into an entirely different culture and a whole new set of environmental details. This time a political regime, which is mercifully left sketchy, has decreed that all forms of life down to the merest microbe are equal. Any aggression, even an argument, is a criminal act. People can only ingest something called E-diet, so insubstantial that men no longer sweat, urinate or defecate. Even so, they kill certain microscopic organisms simply by breathing. The command for general suicide goes out so that "the heinous crimes of murder and pollution committed by our race may in some small way find redress."

Death Day. Dominick Priest, who was ten years old when this lunatic government took over, remembers the old days--eating, hunting, watching such naked aggression as a New York Yankees game. By semistarving himself rather than consuming debilitating E-diet, he retains some strength and resolve. Armed with a pistol stolen from a museum, he manages to outlive Death Day, and with ten members of a lesbian commune starts the awesome business of repopulating the earth. Just before the last men die, he meets an ancient priest named Xavier Paul, who introduces him to wine, hidden away through the years, and a sketchy outline of Christianity, which Dominick had never heard of. What with the wine and his own ignorance, about all he comes away with is the notion of eating and drinking the body of Christ as a religious ritual. It is the idea that will eventually take form in the Feast of Eater.

Excepting science fiction, novels set in the future almost always turn out to be traps for writers. Mano may have intended to make some comment on the tyranny of liberalism--or ecology--run wild, but he fails to get beyond the me chanical business of detailing the societies he envisions. The ravages of the E-diet on the human body alone ac count for pages of clumsy scatological writing. Mano has always been obsessed by the functions and malfunctions of the body, but in earlier works like The Life and Death of Harry Goth, his prose has been funnier and more focused. In the new book he finally runs out of energy, one quality he never seemed to lack before.

One ends by regretting the labor put into this unpromising exercise. It may be that not every novelistic idea should be awarded a 240-page domicile be tween hard covers.

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