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Now it is possible to read this with detachment, noting that the language is sometimes powerful (that "slowly" is masterful), sometimes maddeningly slipshod (as in the slack concluding clause: "because for vampires that is the ultimate experience"). It is possible to read it without endorsing the claim, implicit here, that we are being told something profound about human sexuality. But if, thus warned, we continue to read as the boy continues to listen, then—the logic of Rice's narrative suggests—it is because we long to be vampires too. I finished the novel with the sense of moral contamination that some books leave us with.
Which doesn't mean that—in this book or in the novels that followed—Rice simply argues that killing is OK if that's your inclination. What the books suggest instead is rather murky. On the one hand, Rice celebrates the free spirit, rejecting the Catholicism in which she was raised and all its strictures—and so also the claims of any moral absolutes. (As Ramsland puts it in the Reader, "To her mind, writing about pure abstractions like the traditional notions of good and evil hinders real understanding.") And yet Ramsland quotes her as saying, "I do not think I could go on if I didn't believe in goodness."
In short, there was a profound contradiction at the heart of Rice's work. And so I concluded that review in 1997 by recalling Simone Weil—"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating"—and wondering if, having taken imaginary evil to its limits, Rice might be poised to taste the intoxicating waters of grace.
That review was never published. I'm not sure why. I stuck it in a folder and forgot about it for eight years. Then I received from Knopf an advance copy of Rice's new novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, with an afterword in which she explains how she lost her faith as a young woman and how, in 1998, drawn by the magnetic person of Jesus, she asked a friend if "she knew a priest who could hear my confession, who could help me back to the Church." She recounts her plunge into the strange world of New Testament scholarship and the years of reading that lie behind this new novel. Among the scholars she most warmly acknowledges is N. T. Wright.
Have you ever seen the painting I loved as a child, Jesus holding the lost sheep? Kitschy? Perhaps. But today there must be great rejoicing in heaven.
Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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