Topless.

YOU KNOW that famous Hollywood story about how Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne (brother of the novelist Dominick Dunne), sold the idea for the movie Panic in Needle Park by pitching it to the studio bosses in five words: "Romeo and Juliet on junk"? The idea behind D. Keith Mano's new novel, Topless, is just as compressible: Episcopal priest manages topless bar. And Hollywood has snapped it right up; the movie rights went for a cool half mil before the book had even been sold to a publisher, and it could not have happened to a nicer guy, as any NR reader will agree. Mano has sweated mightily and long in the literary vineyard, trampling out seven fine novels (among them The Bridge, The Death and Life of Harry Goth). Readers of his last, the Joycean Take Five, will find Topless nicely un-Joycean, and into the bargain consecutively paginated.

The narrator, Father Michael Wilson, writes on the first page that "this diary, methinks, will not threaten Georges Bernanos much." This may be what the financial community likes to call "an anchor to windward." Topless is a neat little bastard of a cross between Diary of a Country Priest and . . . hm . . . Silence of the Lambs? It's also a savagely funny send-up of the current state of Episcopalianism while, oddly, reaffirming the ineluctable--to Christians--necessity of Grace, whatever weird, personal highway one travels in order to get it. In this respect Mano, who fled the altar of secular correctness for the pungent incense-billows of Russian Orthodoxy, is a bit like Chaucer, who, having told his wonderful, gross, and carnal tales, in the epilogue throws himself on the mercy of God in the hope He can take a joke.

Father Mike is a decent fellow. With Simon Lynxx, the hero of Take Five, he is a Manoesque--Manoverian?--schlemiel, a good person to whom bad things happen. Simon lost all five senses, one by one; Father Mike, assigned to a well-to-do parish in Lekachman, Nebraska, where he is pinched on the behind on the tennis court by one of his lady congregants, gets a call one day from his sister-in-law telling him that his brother Tony has disappeared--pffft--without a trace. Tony is the proprietor and manager of The Smoking Car, a raunchy topless bar and restaurant in Queens, New York. Foul play? Probably, and perhaps by the mob. Mike gets permission to come back to his natal city to help look for Tony. Once he is back, Ethel, the sister-in-law, importunes him to take over managing The Car until Tony returns. Mike does what he figures is the right thing; his four nieces and nephews, after all, need food and clothing. And so begins his initiation into a netherworld of G-strings, where the girls are named Chinga, Changa, and Cleopatra, and the guys are named Joe. Watching the reasonably innocent Mike learn the ropes at The Car--hiring and firing, meeting the payroll, dealing with on-the-take employees--is hilarious stuff. The diary form allows his jottings full deadpan effect as he records such observations as that of one character who pays him the compliment, "Know how I can tell this is a classy joint? Ice in the urinals."

Perhaps taking its plot clue from the classic New York tabloid headline, HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR, the book goes from black comedy to black mystery as the girls start turning up dead, in various states of mutilation. Who's doing this? Could it even be . . . Mike himself? This is his diary, after all; we only know what he chooses to tell.

Few details are spared. Come to think of it, no details are spared. If a body has been locked in a car trunk for a few weeks, you're about to find out just how bad it stinks. (Hint: a lot.) If in his last book Mano took away his hero's oldfactory glands, he seems determined here to give them back. At times Topless reads like a scent-strip, and not from Armani cologne, either. Viz: "A smell like the stench of Satan's face came from inside of Ethel's house." (Make mine vanilla.)

D. Keith Mano is a journalist and he gets his details specific. He is also, as NR readers know, a jolly Dionysian who likes his meat cooked rare and his Big Apple wormy. He spent months researching the topless world, interviewing some two hundred people. In one memorable scene, Father Mike discovers to his horror that one of the dancers who recently had a baby is selling shots of mother's-milk-and-Kahlua at ten bucks a pop. Something tells me this really happened out there. Reader's Digest is unlikely to excerpt this chestnut for its Life in These United States series, but as a bottom-up novelist, Mano is entitled to his realism, even if he risks making Hilton Kramer wince.

For my money, Mano is one of the sharpest private ontological detectives around, and watching him train his glass on human absurdities is a joy. I liked Topless less for the murder and mayhem than for his riffs and descants, on everything from the superiority of cumbly brown bread to pre-packaged white communition wafers; and for his heat-seeking apercus about such as the women who dance fast in order to blur their nakedness, "the smallest modesty." A jaded patron tells Father Mike: "I find great stupidity in women arousing. But, at my age, it has to be great stupidity. Mere dumbness doesn't do it anymore." Weary over finding dismembered dancers in his bar, and wearier still with trying to reconcile his priesthood with his lust-pandering. Mike sighs to his girlfriend, "I'm gonna go easy for a long time. Right now I want life in the exact-change lane." One of his strippers, Bubbles, demands to know why he doesn't support a woman's "right" to an abortion. "A woman should exercise that right when she gets in bed with a man," he counters. "Women forget about that other right, the right not t'get laid." (That t' starts to cloy after a few hundred or so repetitions.) As a setting for a confessional, a raunchy topless bar in Queens gives good mise-en-scene.

Mano's wit is most lacerating when he trains it on the Episcopal Church: Father Mike's mother, we learn, left the Catholic Church and became an Episcopalian "because it was a step up procured for the local parish during summer as "The Holy Ghost takes a vacation in July and August--it's an Episcopal tradition"; when someone complains to Mike about a fellow priest being repressed, he fires back, "Thing you guys should realize by now--the Episcopal Church doesn't repress its priest enough."

And yet Topless as a whole is far from a mere punchy rejection of Anglican Christianity. On the contrary, after a harrowing climax it ends on a strangely wistful note that leaves one wondering where Mano is going to take his soul and psyche slumming next. My bags are packed. I'm looking forward to the trip.