Singer/songwriter Rufus Wainright is proof of the wonder of good genetics. After all, his parents Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, are well-established in the music industry. Christopher Rice also benefits from the good genetics of having novelist Anne Rice and poet Stan Rice as his parents. His debut novel, A Density Of Souls ( Talk/Miramax Books, 2000 ) , nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Men's Mystery category, has a generous helping of both gay subject matter and mystery.
Gregg Shapiro: Congratulations on your Lambda Literary nomination.
Christopher Rice: I'm absolutely thrilled. I'm up there with the other nominees, in all the categories, and they're writers I've respected for a long time. I thought that A Density Of Souls had the type of subject matter in it that would never get it considered for any type of book award ( laughs ) . It definitely wasn't a critical darling of a book. I'm thrilled and I'm glad it was nominated in the category of Gay Men's Mystery, because that's really what I wanted it to be-;a mystery. A lot of reviewers called it a strange hybrid of genres-;a coming-of-age story and a disaster flick. One reviewer called it "The Catcher In The Rye meets A Perfect Storm."
GS: How does it feel to be nominated alongside your mother Anne Rice?
CR: Very interesting. It feels good. Unfortunately, she won't be able to be there, because she's working on another book. You know how I found out I was nominated? I was surfing on the Internet and I stumbled across a link for the Lambda Literary nominations, and I started reading this press release, and it said, "For the first time ever, a mother and son have been nominated," and my jaw just dropped. I ran downstairs and showed it to her and she was like, "Oh, my God!" It was really neat.
GS: The difficult high school experience of the characters in your novel A Density Of Souls is very vivid. What was your own high school experience like?
CR: Oh, God, it wasn't nearly as bad as it was for them. What I did was took all of my inner turmoil and fears and pain and made them real. I always feared the threat of violence because I knew I was a gay kid living in the closet. I knew that some of my fellow students seemed to be on to me, no matter how much I tried to hide it. I wasn't ever subject to the kind of violence and brutality that Stephen Conlin is in the book, but I always lived in fear of it. I brought everything to the surface for these four characters. That's what defined their high school experience and that's what made it so traumatic for them in later years.
GS: How do you feel about protection for gay and lesbian students in high schools-;gay/straight alliances, etc.?
CR: Personally, I'm shocked by how much the environment in high schools in America seems to have changed just since I left, which was only five or six years ago. There was not even a suggestion of any kind of gay/straight alliance in my high school. My attitude is, more power to them. I think we get into a tricky area when we try to regulate what can be defined as verbal abuse. As someone who is speaking from the position of never having those protections myself, I sort of built up my own sort of personal protections. I think we have a long way to go before the words fag or dyke are eliminated from the average high schooler's vocabulary, but there are other methods by which these organizations can try to get at the abuses that make gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered youth, in high school, feel like outcasts and outsiders. I think the No. 1 goal should be to simply have them recognized as a presence and then fight the backlash that results from that. I guess it would be a two-step process.
GS: The hurricane depiction in the novel is also very convincing.
CR: I lived through a very minor hurricane that almost hit New Orleans. They never hit New Orleans. It's always a near miss. Even the worst, Hurricane Betsy in the '60s, wasn't a direct hit. What I've mainly lived through is the fear that leads up to a hurricane and the events that lead up to Hurricane Brandy's strike, in the book, are definitely modeled after everything that preceded the panic when people thought Hurricane George was going to hit New Orleans. The hurricane itself was probably borne out of the million torrential flooding rainstorms that I lived through as a child that weren't actually hurricane force. New Orleans is a city of violent and extreme weather. Some people might call it heavy-handed symbolism, but it was an irresistible idea to me to have the book finish with this sort of calamity of weather that mirrored all of the tortured events that had been taking place for 200 pages.
GS: Another effective part of the book is your depiction of the fanatical actions by fundamentalist religious group. Can you say something about the group you created?
CR: I don't know for sure whether there are groups as organized or homicidal in the Louisiana swamp, but what I do know is that I was at a dinner for the Human Rights Campaign in New Orleans and a speaker said, "It's easy for those of us who live in Atlanta and New Orleans to convince ourselves that we're surrounded by tolerance. But, really, we live in middle of this oasis of culture, in the middle of a predominantly rural state, where you only have to drive 20 to 30 minutes before you encounter people who share views on race and sexuality that the majority of the country would find prehistoric." So, the idea for the Army Of God, stems from an actual incident where I was going out in the French Quarter in New Orleans and some maniac walked into a gay bar with a grenade and held her at gun point. I think he asked her to pull it. A total lunatic. Hearing this story on the news, the very night I was going out, I thought, I don't know what this guy's background is, but what if one of these individuals decided to come into the city. Suddenly, all of us who thought we were living safe in the French Quarter, which is one of the gayest places in America, realized that we're not alone. The other genesis of that whole idea is what if you took a character such as Brandon Charbonnet, who spent the first two years of his high school career doing nothing but feeding his rage on the football field. I went to high school with so many football jocks, who were obviously not going to be able to parlay their athletic career into a real career. So, what if you took one of these kids who had opened up all these fonts of aggression and let him descend into it. His only life would become rage. What would he do if he was thrown out into the swamp? How would he go about getting what he considered to be his revenge? It was those two elements, in combination, that created them.
GS: Are there plans for a movie adaptation of A Density Of Souls?
CR: I haven't gotten any significant offers on it. I've gotten nibbles, and nothing else. The book, as a movie property, is being represented by an agency in Los Angeles. ... It's interesting, because my only formal writing training was at NYU's Tisch School of The Arts, where I was in the dramatic writing program for a semester, which I left, because I didn't like it. I have a very visual writing style as an influence of that, but at the same time, when I sat down to write this book, I had been working on nothing but screenplays for years-;ever since I left school-;and I was trying to break a lot of the confining rules of screen writing. I was trying to introduce a huge cast of characters with not just one major protagonist.
GS: What about your next novel?
CR: I'm almost finished-;it'll be out in February from Talk/Miramax Books. It's called The Snow Garden. It takes place in a different part of the country. It takes place on a fictional college campus in the Northeast, during winter. It begins with the death of a respected professor's wife. She drives to her death, supposedly drunk, in this icy river. It ignites a big scandal on the college campus, because it turns out that her husband, the professor, is sleeping with one of his male students. This male student comes to believe that the woman's death was anything but accidental.