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 [The Bridge], a fashionable venture into futurism, the author yokes a world-weary priest and a...