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Tug of war for the soul

CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS:
A Spiritual Confession
By Anne Rice
256 pp. Knopf $24.00

Reviewed by Doris E. Pavlichek

When my husband stated that he wanted to read the then new Anne Rice book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, I cringed. I could only imagine that the slim volume was bound to be some sacrilegious rant designed to entertain and further the exploits of one vampire, Lestat. In all fairness, I was a fan of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, but beyond those four books, the tales began to lose me. (My attempt to read Cry to Heaven left me with nightmares for weeks.) So when I saw the Christ the Lord book, I simply said, “You go ahead. I think it would cross a line for me.”

Wasn’t Rice an atheist, I wondered? Wasn’t she known to show up at book signings and fan events in a coffin? What was all this about Christianity? Little did I know that Christ the Lord was Rice’s first book released after she returned to Christianity, specifically Catholicism, the faith of her childhood.

These questions, and many more, were answered in her new memoir Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.

In this book, written in the rich style she’s become known for, Rice shows us her childhood in New Orleans, growing up in a strict Irish Catholic home just blocks from grand churches such as St. Alphonsus.

We hear her mother, who drank herself to death at a tragically young age, whisper to her each morning, “He’s three blocks away. He’s on that altar. Now get up and go.”

Each morning before breakfast and school, Rice and her siblings would wake up to these words and walk to the chapel to attend Mass said in Latin. Until she went away to college at Berkeley, Rice remained a devoted Catholic who strongly desired to be a nun. Her father, who was educated at seminary, discouraged her from choosing such a bleak life for herself. He imagined something more for Anne.

As a child, Rice fell in love with books on Greek mythology and the lives of the saints, though she was a poor reader. These stories, she said, contained both “action and incident,” full of information she “could apply directly to [her] own life.” Her fascination with becoming a nun was fed by the intricate, sometimes painful, stories of the saints she loved, and she could not imagine any other life for herself.

Emerging from this devout, Catholicism-immersed youth to pursue higher education, Rice discovered a world full of other types of knowledge waiting for her. The stimulating intellectual environment she found, along with her growing sexual curiosity, led Rice’s faith to “crack apart.” Tiny cracks soon led to a shattered foundation, and Rice declared herself an atheist.

Those raised in the Church (or any church) can easily identify with the confusion Rice suffered upon encountering a world that seemed to get along just fine without a belief in God. Many of her readers will also identify with the resultant confusion years later that led to a gnawing emptiness so apparent and inescapable that Rice could no longer ignore the incongruence between what she professed and what she in fact believed.

In the intervening years of atheism, Rice married, had two children (and buried one), and became a best-selling novelist of gothic tales of immortal monsters. This is the Rice with which her readers and followers are familiar. Her novels are infused with the struggle between good and evil, between life and death; sometimes, as in the case of Memnoch the Devil, readers encounter Christ and religious artifacts, such as the veil of Veronica. Rice hints that the novel reflected her own growing ambiguity about faith and allowed her to expose the tiniest crack in the foundation of her atheism.

It is then that Christ seems to pursue Rice. One event or icon after another appears in her life. She feels inexplicably drawn to buying religious artifacts and a few important properties from her childhood as they appear on the market, including “the building in which [she] first went to pray.” One particular artifact showing the crucified Christ reaching his arm down to comfort St. Francis of Assisi becomes her favorite. It is not the last time she will encounter St. Francis. The call leads her to Rio de Janeiro and the great statue of Jesus Christ overlooking the harbor. It is her experience at the foot of this great statue that begins her conversion experience back to Christianity.

This beautiful tale of personal redemption is full of the same tug-of-war that is familiar to readers of Rice’s work. The fact that a living soul is at stake makes it even more compelling. Though she perhaps lingers too long in her grade school days, providing details that seem to drag on, Rice fearlessly bares her deepest secrets and fears to the reader, bringing us along on the ride from one extreme to the other. When she entered a final note in her diary the day she receives Communion for the first time in thirty-eight years, a chill ran down my spine. Ultimately, this is the best tale of Rice’s long and fruitful career.

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Doris E. Pavlichek holds a degree in communications and is a technical writer by trade. She’s published two books on network engineering, poetry in the StrokeNet Newsletter, and historical non-fiction in Constellation magazine. She assists with biannual poetry readings at the University of Maryland in College Park. Ms. Pavlichek resides in Frederick, Maryland, with her husband, two English Bulldogs, and three cats.