first ran 9/19/00
(Note: Greg Meyers assisted with the interview and deserves credit, among other things.)
Christopher Rice, 22, is locked into a torturous
three-month book tour promoting his first novel, A Density of Souls,
published by Talk Miramax Books. He doesn’t seem to mind the trilogy of
labels appended to his name (“Rice, the son of author Anne Rice...”; “Rice,
who is gay...”; and “Rice, a southern writer...”) but bristles at the notion
that Density is autobiographical. “Because one of my characters
is gay,” Rice mentioned during a recent interview with the Flor-Ala, “reviewers
are calling the book a memoir or a roman a’ clef in a negative way.”
There are aspects of the novel which do
parallel Rice’s bio. A central character, Stephen, shares Rice’s taste
in athletic men as well as the author’s high school love of theatre. Both
Stephen’s and Rice’s fathers are noted poets. The setting for the novel,
New Orleans, has been Rice’s home since he was ten. Stephen’s mother is
called “weird” by several characters and Rice’s own mother... well, is
Anne Rice. He admits Stephen is based on himself but only in a general
way.
Interestingly, even though he grew up with
the reigning queen of the damned he cites Dickens disciple John Irving,
whose work is as far from supernatural as one can get, as his most immediate
literary influence. “I had never read him and I think every friend in college--the
one year I spent in college--would rave about his stuff. When I picked
up The Cider House Rules, it was the first contemporary novel I
had read that had a huge cast of characters moving over a vast expanse
of time. Yet it never lost its intimacy with them. So I wanted to get that
kind of feel. You know, you have the ensemble characters and... It’s a
shorter span of time but there are as many characters as The Cider House
Rules.” After a pause, he adds laughingly, “It’s not as good as The
Cider House Rules, in my opinion. But that’s what I was going for.”
Another influence woven into Rice’s narrative
is Thomas Mann’s classic novella “Death in Venice,” which follows aging
aristocrat Gustave Auschenbach’s final days in Venice, Italy, where he
meets and secretly falls in love with a young boy named Tadzio.“I remember
reading that as a freshman in college, probably just after I’d come out
of the closet, and thinking ‘Ah!’ You know. ‘This old man is going to do
nothing but watch from afar.’ I thought it would be an interesting parallel
because in my book all of Stephen’s sort of unrequited longing ends up
getting requited. So it’s kind of like, ‘Take that, Thomas Mann.’”
While chiding Auschenbach’s inability to
face his object of passion, Rice’s own characters suffer from similar shortcomings.
When asked about the recurring theme of concealment and denial in his book,
Rice explains, “For the majority of the story, you’re swamped with all
these characters who are suffering from the secrets being kept by the children.
And there was something to me that really worked to have, to find out the
most devastating secret of all is being harbored by two parents. And that
these children... They are to blame for the things they’ve done but there’s
still a parental power presiding over them that ends up being kind of essentially
corrupt. So they don’t exist in a vacuum.”
The extreme consequences of kept secrets
is another example of how his fiction springs more from imagination than
from personal experience. His relationship with his mother and father,
Stan Rice, is open and positive. Both parents routinely offer him guidance.
Most recently, his father told him, “Sometimes you learn more from the
works of art that you hate because they teach you what not to do. Or what
you don’t want to do.”
In August, Rice was The Advocate’s cover
story. “I’ve signed more [copies of The Advocate] than of my book in certain
cities,” he jokes. And in the past month, he has been to many cities, flying
from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. This past Friday it was
Hoover, Alabama. “I fly to a city at, like, eight in the morning and I
do... I’ve been doing a lot of live t.v. so it’s driving straight from
the airport into a t.v. studio and then putting a mic on. Today was rare
because I actually had time to go back to my hotel and chill out before
I came here but usually I don’t. Usually it’s boom boom boom boom. This
past week’s been particularly hellish because I’ve been driving through
the south as opposed to flying and I had to drive from New Orleans to Mobile,
Mobile to Jackson and then Oxford and last night from Oxford to Memphis
so I could catch a plane to come here. That’s non-stop.”
After a four day break at home in New Orleans,
he will be off again, this time to Atlanta, New York City, Ann Arbor, Austin
and Denver, among other cities. When the tour ends in mid-October, Rice
hopes to complete his second manuscript, a murder mystery set on a Northeastern
college campus.