Back to Jesus
After stupendous sales for her tales of vampires, witches and lust, novelist Anne Rice has turned to Jesus – personally and literarily.
Her innovative new novel, “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” (Knopf, 336 pages, $25.95), depicts Jesus as a 7-year-old lad, speaking in his own words as the holy family moves from Egyptian exile to Nazareth.
“What did it feel like to be God and man as a child?” Rice says she asked herself.
Oddly, the question carries an echo of her first supernatural thriller three decades ago – “Interview with the Vampire,” later made into a movie – which explored a vampire’s first-person perspective.
Rice said in a telephone interview that she has no regrets about writing her Gothic novels, which also include “The Vampire Lestat,” the theme of an upcoming Elton John musical.
“I see this as a journey,” she said. “They were written with complete commitment.”
But that’s all behind her now, she stressed; her 2003 vampire novel, “Blood Canticle,” was her last.
Why give it all up?
“I wanted to write only for Jesus Christ,” she replied, noting that the current novel is intended as part of a series.
“My hope is to live long enough to finish the life of Christ,” the 64-year-old author added. “God is interesting again.”
She does express some anxiety about how her fans, accustomed to her darker themes, will react to “Christ the Lord.”
“I have received no resistance from believers,” she said. “The only skeptics about this book are skeptics.”
Rice’s new burst of creativity stems from her return to Roman Catholicism – though she seems a most unlikely recruit. She quit church as a teen and never looked back for decades. Her late husband was a convinced atheist, and her son is a gay activist.
Some critics thought her vampires’ angst reflected the author’s own spiritual restlessness.
As Rice describes matters, there was “a yearning, a nostalgia, a grief” toward Catholicism, but “I had this idea lodged in my head, I could never go back. … The longing was tremendous. The desire was tremendous.
“I gradually realized I could return, that I believed again.”
After years of pondering, the climax occurred in 1998 at her home in New Orleans. Rice asked part-time assistant Amy Troxler, a parochial school religion teacher, to recommend a priest. Troxler immediately took Rice to the Rev. Dennis Hayes of Arabi, La., who became her spiritual director.
The move wasn’t easy, Rice says, because “I was tortured by questions I couldn’t resolve.” Among these are her church’s ban on women priests and opposition to gay sex.
She is convinced both will vanish eventually.
Though some popular preachers claim faith produces good fortune, Rice has faced serious problems since rejoining the church: the death of her husband, a diabetic coma and burst appendix (both life-threatening), gastric bypass surgery to counter a dangerous weight gain, and surgery for an intestinal blockage.
Didn’t that shake her newfound faith?
“God is as much with the person who drowns in the flood as with the person who’s rescued,” she asserted. “It has never occurred to me to blame him for anything.
“Things happen. People are always getting sick and dying.”
“Christ the Lord” is devoutly awe-struck toward its lead character and orthodox in its theology. There are odd notes, however, as the story opens.
Jesus denounces a neighborhood bully who then dies, after which Jesus resurrects him. Also, Jesus’ brother recalls how he magically fashioned clay birds that came alive.
The strange tales didn’t come from Rice. Rather they originate with the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” a late apocryphal book the early church rejected. (The bird incident reappears in Islam’s Quran.)
Bart Ehrman, religion chairman at the University of North Carolina, says “nobody takes this seriously as history,” but it shows how some ancient Christians speculated about Jesus’ childhood.
By coincidence, Rice’s book was released on Tuesday at the same time as the artful “Jesus: A Novel” (Zondervan, 400 pages, $21.99) by National Book Award winner Walter Wangerin Jr.
“Maybe this is inevitable after years of popular atheism dominating our culture. Maybe people are hungry,” Rice mused.
John Wilson, editor of the evangelical journal Books & Culture, said the simultaneous release of the Jesus novels by Rice and Wangerin isn’t surprising – writers have continually produced fiction about Jesus. Among them: Anthony Burgess, Robert Graves, Nikos Kazantzakis, D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal.
None of their novels were masterpieces, and “often they just seem absurd,” Wilson said. “You don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, both with the pious variety and the debunkers.”
As for Rice, he thinks she simply “had taken this flirtation with evil as far as it would go and returned to the good.”