A good novel about a good man.

A Certain Man By Zane Kotker Knopf, 367 pp., $8.95 You’ll think I’m neurotic. Not once in the last 15 years, not once, have I chosen a book to read. They arrive from someplace else: omens, messages. I open them as I’d open a midnight telegram. There are two large cloth sacks beside my desk: I load these, fifty or sixty books in each, without looking, by pure chance, at a certain bookstore. I finish every book: from preface to appendix. (If I lose the book

I’m on I cannot—it’s, well, physical— start another until I’ve procured a second copy. In one case I went through February without reading: the longest month that year.) And bizarre items come out: a dictionary, a Bible, books I know could not have been placed there by human agency. The thing scares me. Again and again, right on time, books pertinent to my writing, to my current life’s crisis, are sent along. Trinity Sunday, 1974, I pulled a novel about Nicodemus: figure the percentage on that coincidence. These cloth sacks have supervised my mind more than any person or ideology. It’s a way—there should be other ways— in which I let the spirit operate unquestioned. Like belonging to some supernatural Literary Guild.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.

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A Certain Man By Zane Kotker Knopf, 367 pp., $8.95 You’ll think I’m neurotic. Not once in the last 15 years, not once, have I chosen a book to read. They arrive from someplace else: omens, messages. I open them as I’d open a midnight telegram. There are two large cloth sacks beside my desk: I load these, fifty or sixty books in each, without looking, by pure chance, at a certain bookstore. I finish every book: from preface to appendix. (If I lose the book

I’m on I cannot—it’s, well, physical— start another until I’ve procured a second copy. In one case I went through February without reading: the longest month that year.) And bizarre items come out: a dictionary, a Bible, books I know could not have been placed there by human agency. The thing scares me. Again and again, right on time, books pertinent to my writing, to my current life’s crisis, are sent along. Trinity Sunday, 1974, I pulled a novel about Nicodemus: figure the percentage on that coincidence. These cloth sacks have supervised my mind more than any person or ideology. It’s a way—there should be other ways— in which I let the spirit operate unquestioned. Like belonging to some supernatural Literary Guild.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.