Anne Rice: 'It's a different season for me now'

Posted by The Times-Picayune March 05, 2008 4:15AM

AP PHOTO/LENNY IGNELZIAnne Rice talks about her move from N.O. and L.A., and her transition from vampire novelist to Jesus storyteller.

By Susan Larson
Book editor

New Orleans has always offered an intriguing blend of real and imagined literary landscapes, and many of its most beloved haunts are the creations and homes of novelist Anne Rice. Tours still pass by the house on First Street, and stop by the St. Charles Avenue house where she grew up; people still pause to give the guardian angels of St. Elizabeth's a second look.

Readers could imagine her literary life here, could see its outward manifestation. But the artist herself is four years gone, leaving her New Orleans life for a fresh start in California. After her husband, the poet Stan Rice, died in 2002, losing his battle with cancer, it was time to move on.

"If Stan hadn't died, I probably never would have left," Rice said, speaking by phone from her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. "I was all alone in that huge house. A certain vein of sadness had been opened, and a shadow had fallen over my life.

"My only beloved son was in Los Angeles, and I felt like moving out to California was a good thing to do."

There was a change in her writing as well, as the novelist, so famous for creating vampires and witches, returned to her Catholic faith and devoted herself to writing a projected four-volume life of Jesus. The first book, "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," was published in 2005. The second, "Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana," landed in bookstores yesterday. Rice said she has found her true vocation.

"I think this new book is a very radical book," she said. "The bar of realism is so high, and yet it's so completely orthodox. My faith in the Bible and in Jesus is absolute. I don't rationalize. Everything I write is based on what he does in the Bible and what the Bible tells us about him.

"It's a radical accomplishment -- and I don't know whether people will see that -- to combine an accurate history of the period and archaeology and geology and be completely faithful to the Bible and yet write a novel that keeps people turning the pages. I have created an emotional life for him that fits my faith in him as God and man.

AP PHOTO/DIMA GAVRYSH"If Stan hadn't died, I probably never would have left," Rice said, speaking by phone from her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. "I was all alone in that huge house. A certain vein of sadness had been opened, and a shadow had fallen over my life."

"I see that as my true vocation, to write about his humanity without really compromising his divinity."

And don't get her started on Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code."

"I'm so outraged by it," she said. "And in a way this book is an answer to 'The Da Vinci Code.' There's not a scrap of evidence to support any of those theories."

Her depiction of Jesus is based on, among other things, the idea that "he was sinless and people gave him a hard time about it. People would have made fun of him for being shy, would have said, why are you still a carpenter? Why don't you give up on all that and get married? In my book, the one thing he will not know is the intimacy of marriage. He said, 'I will know it by its absence.' And that's a very daring thing to write."

Her next book, "Kingdom of Heaven," continues Jesus' story through the raising of Lazarus and ends with his decision to go to Jerusalem. The fourth will take readers through Passion and Resurrection.

"In a way I'd like to stop with the third, like to leave him on top of that hill in Jerusalem," she said, "but aesthetically or morally or emotionally, I think I would demand it all."

The books have brought Rice legions of Christian readers, and she is hopeful of reaching more. "I just want people to give these books a chance," she said.

Rice has always been a writer in direct contact with her audience, and these days, that comes mostly through her Web site; she has also posted YouTube interviews about her research for these books.

"My health doesn't allow me to tour anymore," she said. "I'm a type one diabetic, and I did a tour in 2005 and it just about killed me. In years past I had a lot of contact with my readers right at the front gate. I knew who they were and I saw them. It was a lot of fun and I miss that contact. But I think those days of great big signings are gone."

In addition to her fiction, Rice has written a spiritual memoir of growing up Catholic in New Orleans and returning to her faith, "Coming Out of the Darkness," that will be published in the fall.

Beyond her own work, Rice is the guardian of her husband Stan's legacy: his paintings, which she hopes to place in a Southern museum, and the unpublished writing he left behind.

"I'd love to publish those parts of his diaries that were about writing poetry," she said. "And there were quite a few unpublished poems. He was very hard on his early work. There's quite a lot that could be published."

Then there's the successful career of her son, Christopher, whose best-selling mysteries and thrillers have continued the family tradition of best-selling fiction.

"I don't read them until he's finished," she said, "but I've been blown away by each one of them. He's so brave. He writes about his immediate surroundings, what's happening on the news and in his life. I usually need some distance of several decades."

Post-Katrina, Rice was one of the first writers to respond in print -- in an angry piece in The New York Times -- about the disastrous response to that emergency, but she hasn't been able to bring herself to return to the city.

She looks back with affection on her New Orleans glory days.

"We came from San Francisco and were pitched right into this great big family, so many loving cousins," she said. "I was glad Christopher got to know this great big family. I remember when he was maybe 11 or 12 and he was pallbearer for my great-aunt, Sister Mary Liguori, and she was there when I was a little child. There was a wound for me -- you know I left New Orleans against my will when I was 15 -- and that wound has healed. I think perhaps I was meant to leave when I did.

"If I were to move back, I think that my frustration over what's happening there would just consume me," she said. "I don't think the nation has grasped the magnitude of what's happened and (doesn't) understand what's involved. I feel powerless because I feel my vocation is these books.

Rice, who became famous through her books about vampires, has shifted the subject in her new book to the life of Christ.

"I miss New Orleans terribly. Maybe at some point I'll be able to have a place there. I miss everybody, I miss people excruciatingly -- cousins, friends, people who used to work for me, the parish, St. Mary's Assumption Church, I miss it all.

"But it's a different season for me now. It's a time for peacefulness."

Now, instead of listening for the rain on the banana leaves in a New Orleans garden, she writes while gazing out on the California desert, an inspiring view for a novelist who has just imagined Jesus' 40 days and nights in such a landscape.

"It does look like the Jordan Valley," she said. "I look out at the mountains every day. It's very quiet."

In an interview with Time, she raised the possibility of another Lestat novel, a story of redemption.

"That book will only be written if I can keep my commitment to the Lord," she said. "If I can work out a book where Lestat is saved, yes, I'll write it. But they're such separate worlds for me. Those vampires are reflections of my lost years as an atheist. But it may happen."

It is interesting to imagine the redemption of Lestat in a post-Katrina New Orleans, and Rice doesn't discount that prospect.

"In my mind," she said, "he is roaming those streets now."

Book editor Susan Larson can be reached at slarson@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3457.

COMMENTS (28)Post a comment

Posted by glenns1713 on 03/05/08 at 8:41AM

It's good to see Ms.Rice do something good with the last third of her life.Forget fantasy and consentrate on what really lasts forever.

Anne Rice: 'It's a different season for me now'

Posted by The Times-Picayune March 05, 2008 4:15AM

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