FAMILYFANS Books & Comics

CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS: A Spiritual Confession

by Anne Rice

(Knopf)

Reader Appeal: Adults; Teens who are fans of Anne Rice's fiction

Genre: Autobiography

A few years ago, the literary world was shocked to learn that Anne Rice, author of the Vampire Chronicles (Interview with the Vampire, etc.) had become a Christian. Just as shocking, she wasn’t going to write about vampires any more but was turning her hand to writing a novelization of the life of Christ. Since then we’ve seen two installments, Out of Egypt and The Road to Cana. Though controversial in many ways, the books unapologetically presented Jesus as the orthodox Christ as described in the Bible. And now Anne Rice has opened up and provided us with the details of her own spiritual journey, that took her from childhood belief, to years of atheism, and back to that belief in Jesus Christ.

Called Out of Darkness is a fairly straightforward book. At its heart it’s a simple prodigal’s tale. It begins with her childhood and describes her experience of faith as a little girl growing up in the Catholic church in New Orleans. Interestingly, Rice was a very devoted Catholic and was raised and educated in a devotedly all-Catholic environment. She even wanted to become a nun at one point, but was persuaded that it was not for her. As with many people who have struggled with such confrontations, she found herself having a hard time when she went off to college and entered the world outside the church. Unable to separate her relationship to God from her relationship to the church, and unable to reconcile the ways and restrictions of the church to the world she wanted to explore, she lost both.

The process of coming back to God took years, and it was as hard for her to give up her faith in atheism as it was for her to give up her faith in Christ. Various things are mentioned as playing a part in her eventual return: the historical witness of the Jews, the love of her churchgoing extended family, the power of the story and idea of the Incarnation, the sense of beauty and meaning she saw in the world and in art. Even after she returned to faith in Christ it was a long journey of reconciliation, particularly her return to the church. In the last few chapters she details her own journey to discovery and her thoughts on how she would live her life for Christ (writing for him, only for him). She also talks about how she struggled to understand and find peace with the church of today, which she had so long been outside of. In the end, she concludes, it’s Christ that is most important, and his love, and she vows not leave him or his church ever again.

The tough thing about reviewing an autobiography is that it’s the personal expression of a person’s life, and the plot isn’t a plot but a person's life. So the best I can do is to tell you what this book is and what it isn’t and some of my own personal reactions. There’s no doubt that Anne Rice is a great writer. This isn’t a novel, though, and it isn’t a definitive biography of her life. Years of her life and tons of important details are skipped over in a few brief mentions. This is the story of her faith, not her life as an author as a whole. It's about what faith meant for her as a child, how she lost it, and how it eventually crept back into her life.

Rice is a also a visceral writer; she uses writing to try to express the feelings and experiences evoked by visual and auditory experiences. She’s very good at it, too, but with the book consisting so much of her constantly offering up these details (mostly in descriptions of religious places and art and hymns, etc.), I found it a bit short on the information I was interested in and sometimes a little tedious. I felt that some of the key details of what had happened and why it happened - and what she felt and thought - were glossed over in a muddle of sensory images. The book is also very loosely structured and jumps around by association, following the mind of the author from one topic and time to another without much regard for timeline, which some people may find hard to follow.

In the end, the book left me feeling unsatisfied, though in many ways it was very interesting and well-written. Though I found it lacking as a source of information, it really does help you to experience was it was like to be Anne Rice. One thing the personal style does accomplish is really revealing her as a human, as person just like you and me with feelings and struggles and passions and questions and pains. And Rice's descriptions of her thoughts and feelings upon her conversion are deep, sincere, and moving in a way that captures and expresses the heart of what it is like to meet Christ intimately, personally. What’s especially great about it is how she can describe it as an outsider, using her skills as a novelist and using her perspective as someone who has been outside Christianity for decades, explaining and defending it to a general (skeptical) audience in a way that can be easily understand.

I also enjoyed hearing Rice's thoughts on what it’s like being a major media figure in a culture where Hollywood and television have so little regard for faith. It was interesting to read about how she feels that discovering faith is still very much alive in the world today and that the Bible is far more than just a collection of out-of-date fictional stories. Atheism and the death of God and religion was a picture of the world she embraced for decades, only to see it radically overturned years later. I only wish she had spent more time helping us to better understand that picture and how and why and what it is like to be someone who has crossed over the chasm in our culture (and its worldviews). It also struck me as unusual that so little time was spent on the deaths of her daughter and husband and her husband’s reaction to her conversion, but in the end everything that is or isn’t in there is that way simply because of who Anne Rice is and what is important, unimportant, exciting, or painful for her.

Though not my favorite biography, this was an interesting and enjoyable book, particularly if you’ve read any of Anne Rice’s novels. And her story really is interesting, and one many people will be able to identify with. As with her other books, there are some slightly controversial elements (she is Anne rice after all), but there’s nothing controversial about the supremacy of the power and love of Christ and its ability to transform a human life.

FAMILYFANS RATING: B

--MV

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