Our friend Dave Lull recently sent me a link to a National Review article reviewing the late D. Keith Mano’s novel, Topless, which was released 30 years ago and is (like most of his work) out of print.
I hope it won’t be offensive to our readers to link to this review by Michael Washburn: Topless, a Noir Tragicomedy that Anticipated the Scandals of the Present.
Topless is the first-person account, in the form of diary entries, of a Nebraska-based Episcopal priest, Mike Wilson, who comes to New York after the death of a young woman named Rita and the disappearance of a man involved with her, who happened to run the Smoking Car, a strip joint in Queens. The man is Tony Wilson, Mike’s brother. How pitifully unprepared poor Mike is for the world — of exhibitionism, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs — in which his brother thrived….
If the concept sounds salacious, it is, but the book looks at all the sleaze with a Christian (if often distracted) eye. Tony Wilson knows from the beginning that he’s playing with fire, getting involved in his brother’s world. But he is full of rationalizations. In the end, what he discovers is as much about himself and his limitations as about the solution to the mystery. And there’s a biblical twist at the conclusion that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind.
As reading matter for Christians, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the book (if you can find a copy). Author Mano, to the extent I understand him, struggled most of his life to find a Christian response to the sexual revolution, which seemed so overwhelming and permanent back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. (Little remains of it now, I’d say, thanks to Feminism and Wokeness, except for its contempt for marriage and its reverence for abortion.) I don’t think Mano ever really succeeded in his effort, even to his own satisfaction. The book does anticipate our own times in a way, as Washburn says, but in other ways it’s hopelessly stuck in a cultural moment now dead and buried.
