Readings: How It Works

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Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

On a Saturday morning, I make a routine trip into town to go to the public library. I have a book to return, but no intention of borrowing anything on this visit. Nonetheless, a new memoire by novelist Anne Rice catches my eye, and I take it out on a whim. Somewhere in the book, Rice mentions that one of her sources in researching her two novels about Jesus has been Paula Fredriksen. Since I’d come across that name in reading before and had made a mental note to one day check her out, this reference became the occasion for me to borrow this book from the university library.

In reading Fredriksen, I was led, in a footnote concerning a passage from the Gospel of Mark, to this book by the critic Frank Kermode, and duly borrowed it from the university library as well. In his book, Kermode uses a novel entitled Party Going by Henry Green to illustrate the mechanism of interpreting a narrative. Kermode made the novel seem interesting enough that I wanted to read it too.

Having decided to write about all this, I began searching for a link to a description of Party Going to use for this post. What I learned was that Amazon.com has no information on it, because the book is apparently not currently in print. I went, therefore, to Wikipedia for this article, which mentions Kermode’s use of Party Going, and also notes that Green’s best-known work is another novel entitled Loving. I have since borrowed both of these Green novels from the university library and added them to my "to read" stack. And so it goes.

My intention in writing about these things is that somebody, anybody, happening across my site might be prompted by my serial enthusiasms to hunt down at least some of these books and read them.

Hey, listen—it couldn’t hurt.
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Reflections: Have a Rice Day

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To close this previous, semi-snarky post, I wrote: “…I am hoping that the final quarter of Anne Rice’s latest book will be inspirational.”

Having now finished that book without major reassessment of my previously expressed opinion of it, I can report nonetheless that, if the final quarter of the book lacked inspirational impact, it was not for any failure on the part of Rice to try to make it hard-hitting.

She reports that as she groped her way back towards an ever more urgent commitment to Christ

…I found myself reading the Gospel of Matthew more than the other Gospels. I found myself entranced with the Sermon on the Mount.
And something came clear to me that had never been clear before. Loving our neighbors and our enemies is perhaps the very hardest thing that Christ demands. It’s almost impossible to love one’s neighbors and enemies. It’s almost impossible to feel that degree of total giving to other human beings. …One has to love the rude salesclerk, and the foreign enemy of one’s country; one has to love those who are “patently wrong” in their judgments of us. One has to love those who despise us openly and write and tell us so by email. One has to love the employee who steals from you, and the murderer excoriated on national television. [p.224]

One would think that the above goes without saying for any Christian. But more often, I think, these words are talked-but-not-walked. This is perhaps the perfect example of a Great Truth that we’ve heard so often, and accepted so entirely without reflection, so entirely without contemplation of its meaning for our daily lives, that it has become just background static—mere wallpaper in a room that we rarely enter.

Rice later says:

The more…I listen to people around me talk about their experience with Jesus Christ and with religion, the more I realize…that what drives people away from Christ is the Christian who does not know how to love. A string of cruel words from a Christian can destroy another Christian. [p.227]

Yeah. There’s a lot of that going around. Persons interested in a practical demonstration of this phenomenon can browse the grounds here. Rice next asks the crucial question by quoting some Scripture:

But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for He makes His sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
XXXHow can this not be enough?

How, indeed. Rice immediately answers that question by posing another:

How is it that I, unlike Him, am a broken creature of my time? [p.243]

While I can’t say that I am exactly inspired by the judgment implicit in the question, I can certainly admit that it nails my predicament.
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Readings: Arroz con Pollo

I remember being very enthusiastic about Anne Rice’s novel, Interview With the Vampire, when I read it, sometime in the late 1970’s. I read at least two more of her vampire novels, although with waning enthusiasm. I also, at some point, found Feast of All Saints, her novel about not-quite-white society in New Orleans, in a remainders bin, and read that with a modicum of pleasure. But after that point my tolerance for Anne Rice had maxed-out. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t read any more of her novels—or, at least that if I tried, I didn’t finish them—until her two novels about Jesus Christ (Christ the Lord—Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord—the Road to Cana) were recently published. I read them both. They aren’t the best novelizations of Christ’s life that I’ve encountered, but they are both well worth reading. They are the efforts of a lapsed Catholic who has returned to the Church. As such, they are very devout, if not, perhaps, strictly orthodox (?).

Anyhoo, on a visit to the public library the other day, I happened to glance over at the new book shelf where I spotted Called Out of Darkness—a spiritual confession, Anne Rice’s natural history of her return to the Faith. I’m always a sucker for a good spiritual memoir, so I borrowed it.

As of tonight, I’ve read about 3/4 of the book. I intend to finish it, but I can’t give it a glowing review. While there is some good writing about the beauties of New Orleans and Rice’s extremely conservative Catholic childhood, overall I find the book’s pacing to be choppy, a result of having been badly edited. Moreover, I find Rice’s self-portrait to be wildly self-contradictory, and not quite believable. I find that I don’t like her very much, or sympathize much with her various modes and phases. But that’s just me. You might feel altogether differently about it.

Anne Rice is apparently about six years older than me. I was surprised to learn that she had left New Orleans and was living in San Francisco, smack in the middle of the Haight-Ashbury heart of the hippie counter-culture at the height of the sixties. For a time she and her husband had an apartment in the building that also housed the famed Free Clinic. In describing those days, Rice makes the following observation:

In the midst of rampant liberation, the flower children were stridently if not viciously sexist. “Chicks” were supposed to bake bread, clean up, feed their hippie boyfriends, and if at all possible hold a job to support the artist-poets of the group, and perhaps even fork over a bit of financial support received from frantic parents back home. It was no accident that these “chicks” wore long dresses and long hair. They looked like pioneer women, and they worked just about that hard.

Yeah, well, in short, Ms. Rice, it was paradise. It was a great system. It worked for me. And it was kicked all to pieces by the Man. We were getting laid, you see, and the Man was not. What came after, to fill that human, natural (not to say mammalian) void, was—God help us!—Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug. Oh, the humanity!

Just the other day I was trying to explain to my two daughters, both in college now, that “chick” is not a sexist designation, in any meaningful sense. But they weren’t buying it. Thanks a lot, Bella-baby.

All of that said, I am hoping that the final quarter of Anne Rice’s latest book will be inspirational. The word is out that I am in great need of that kind of thing.

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Readings: on The Road to Cana

Back on March 8, I posted on the Anne Rice novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. I had been inspired to read the book by the review of its sequel, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, posted by Tom of Disputations on February 23 (scroll down).

I have now, finally, this week, been able to get my hands on The Road to Cana, which I finished reading this morning. Since we already have Tom’s fine review, I will make only a couple of small observations about the book. Both come near the end of the novel, at the Wedding in Cana, after Christ has chosen the first of His disciples. First, a passage that particularly struck me as instructive. Here, Jesus is at the wedding feast, listening to the rhythm of the drums, and pondering the nature of time:

Time beat on, and in time, as I’d told the Tempter, yes, as he’d tempted me to stop Time forever – in time, there were things yet unborn. It struck a deep dark shiver in me, a great cold. But it was only the shiver and fear known to any man born.

I did not come to stop it, I did not come to leave it at such a moment of mysterious joy. I came to live it, to surrender to it, to endure it, to discover in it what it was I must do, and whatever it was, well, it had only begun.

It strikes me that Anne Rice has said something profound here about our calling to pick up our own crosses, each of us, and to follow Him.

Finally, there is a character in the novel whom Anne Rice has imagined, named Silent Hannah. As the name suggests, she is a deaf-mute. Rice portrays her as a dear, loving young woman, isolated by her disability, but devoted throughout her life to Avigail, whose wedding is being celebrated at Cana. There are several occasions throughout the plotting of the novel at which the reader wonders—why does Jesus not restore Silent Hannah’s ability to hear and to speak?

Finally, on the second to last page of the book, after Jesus has changed the water to wine, and has wandered a ways from the celebration, come these lines:

Beyond them and far to the left, on the farthest margin of the garden away from us, amid a small grove of shining trees, there stood a tiny robed figure with her back to us, rocking from side to side, her veiled head bowed.
Tiny and alone, this dancer, seemingly watching the rising sun.

Tiny dancer, I thought? Is Anne Rice giving a hat-tip to Elton John here, or what? But, no, of course not. What Anne Rice has done is save the healing of Silent Hannah to the very last page of the book. Is this overly sentimental? Is it a chick-lit move on Rice’s part?:

I placed my hand gently on her throat.
She struggled, eyes wide, and then she whispered it:
“Yeshua!” She was pale with shock. Yeshua, Yeshua, Yeshua.
“Listen to me,” I said as I put my hand on her ear and then on my heart – the old gestures. “ ‘Hear O Israel,’ “ I said, “ ‘the Lord Our God is One.’ “
...I repeated it once more and then the third time she spoke the words with me.

Hear O Israel. The Lord Our God is One.
I held her in my arms.
And then I turned to join the others.
And we started for the road.

I wept. (Well...let's just say I got a little misty.)

Readings: on Out of Egypt

On February 23, 2008, Tom, the Keeper of the Keys at Disputations, posted a review of the recently-released novel about Jesus by that renowned retailer of vampire sagas, Anne Rice. The novel, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, is the second offering in what is sure to be at least a trilogy, and perhaps more. I had seen the first novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, on the new book shelf at the public library when it came out. I picked it up and riffled the pages briefly, then put it down. As Tom phrased it in his review of the sequel, “Writing in the voice of the Son of God seemed like a case of trying too hard, and I gave Out of Egypt a miss.” My thoughts were akin to his. Jesus at age seven just didn’t engage my imagination enough to devote the requisite time to it. Then I read Tom’s brief review of The Road to Cana.

Knowing Tom to be a ruthless critic with the highest conceivable standards, I began reading, fully expecting the review to be a hatchet job to make the ghost of Carrie Nation moan with envy. I was very much surprised to be completely wrong. You should read Tom’s piece for yourself (you’ll have to scroll down to it, as I can’t figure out how to link to specific posts on Disputations), but his bottom line is: “The Road to Cana is easily the best -- the best written, the most Catholic -- of the handful of novelizations of Jesus's life that I've read.” No shit, sez I. This dictated the necessity of reading The Road to Cana. But since we’ve obviously got a boxed set building here, and I’m more than a little anal about completeness, I knew that I’d have to read Out of Egypt first. And so I am.

As of this writing I’m not even half-way into the novel. But you must understand that I’m not publishing a cyber-mag here; I try to make Rodak Riffs a true “weblog”—that is, a log of what I’m doing. As I tool down the road, I stop for hitch-hikers; if you want to grab a copy of Out of Egypt and read along, please do so. My opinion of the novel so far is positive.

As the novel opens, Jesus is seven years-old. Joseph has had a premonition that Herod is about to die, and has resolved to return to Nazareth, after stopping at Jerusalem for the Passover. The family is living and working in Alexandria. The whole, extended Holy Family is there, working in the family business; Uncle Cleopas, the several Marys, the cousins of Jesus, his half-brother, James, some other uncles, etc. For Protestants, such as myself, who have been skeptical of the prominence given the Holy Family, and particularly Joseph, by Catholics, Anne Rice here provides a very convincing portrait of Joseph as the patriarchal head of the clan. His word is law.

Tom says of the Jesus of The Road to Cana, “…as he waits for whatever it is that he's waiting for, he's regularly pecked at by those around him who are getting on with their lives.” This is already going on in Out of Egypt. But it is more that Jesus is trying to figure out why he’s treated as so special by all the others—particularly his uncanny cousin, John.

This is already getting longer than I had intended for it to be. Therefore, briefly, some things that I like about the novel:

1) It stresses the historical fact that Jesus was born and raised in a Greek-speaking civilization. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all of the other characters speak fluent Greek, as well as Aramaic. Rice actually has Jesus beginning his formal education under the tutelage of Philo. One of the reasons for Joseph removing the family back to rural Nazareth, despite their material success in Alexandria, is that he wants Jesus to be educated where they read the Scriptures in Hebrew, rather than in Greek.

2) Rice stresses the violence of the world in which Jesus lived and delivered his message. It is so easy for us to imagine Jesus strolling through a tranquil countryside, delivering his speeches to a care-free people. The first thing that happens when the clan arrives in Jerusalem is a massacre, conducted by the palace guard of Archelaus, successor to Herod, of the Jewish pilgrims arriving at the temple to celebrate the Passover. Once the clan has fled from Jerusalem, staying with relatives in the vicinity of Jericho, their temporary dwelling is invaded by Jewish insurgents who are intent on looting their possessions in order to carry on the fight against the Roman occupiers. The family puts up no resistance, behaving as cowering and penniless peasants, and are not harmed by the rebel band. After the bandits have left, Joseph instructs his family thusly: “Remember this, “ he said. He looked from James to me and to Little Joses, and to my cousins who stared up at him, and to John who stood beside his mother. “Remember. Never lift your hand to defend yourself or to strike. Be patient. If you must speak, be simple.” The pacifist in me likes that touch.

3) At the point in the novel where I have stopped reading in order to write this, Elizabeth has just announced that she will soon die, and that John will be sent to live with the Essenes, in the desert. This clearly opens up room for some very interesting speculation about an interesting group, and I look forward to seeing how Rice develops this theme.

Enough. Get it. Read it, as I shall now go and do.