I can’t say that I’ve had a long and valuable relationship with Anne Rice and her popular vampire novels. Rice, who died a few days ago, rocketed to stardom right around the time I tiptoed into literary journalism as a critic and book review editor in the mid-1980s. I think our paths crossed in New Orleans once, but there’s no evidence I ever interviewed or wrote about her. But only this year I was pleasantly surprised to unearth a piece of literary criticism of her own. In it she held up Evan Connell as a genuine and formidable talent. Her review of Connell’s story collection, Saint Augustine’s Pigeon, appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1980. Rice had a connection to the Bay Area—she lived in San Francisco in the 1960s and ‘70s—but in my Connell research I don’t recall coming across anything that indicated they knew each other.

Saint Augustine’s Pigeon is a very fine collection, assembling some of Connell’s best previously published stories alongside a handful of new ones. The book began Connell’s close relationship with North Point Press, the archly literary publisher based in Berkeley. Shortly after it came out, in 1980, North Point made a push to bring new attention to Connell’s Bridge novels and then acquired Connell’s Son of the Morning Star and helped turn it into his most commercially successful book.

Rice’s review begins with high praise for Mrs. Bridge (“nothing short of a masterpiece”), equating it on the basis of style and literary accomplishment with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

In the stories, she finds strong themes relating to our human place in the universe. Her perceptions are sharp and resonant:  “Connell’s characters are never lost. Rather they stand alone in the foreground of a vision that perceives with unwavering clarity the appalling vastness around them.” In reading one of my favorite stories, “Arcturus,” she writes, “we understand that if there is anything absurd or horrifying in this world it is perhaps the inability to remember what is, and what is not, eternal.”

Rice laments that Connell is not better known (a theme that shapes my book all these decades later), and says that the fact that most of his books were not much available at the time was a “disgrace.” 

I can’t argue at all with her conclusion: “What distinguishes Connell is the sparkling intelligence of his vision, the rock hard poetry of his craft, and the sublime accessibility of his complex ideas, woven as they are into narratives which are themselves exquisite accomplishments.”