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the rococo, and the Romantic, but they take with them decidedly optimistic visions of sexuality and the supremacy of art.

They refuse to be classified as any one type of writing.

They attract all sorts of readers, and there is no consensus among even the most ardent fans of the books as to what the books mean.

Every time one of the books is adapted in film or onstage or for television, there is a huge disagreement amongst the people involved as to what the book is about. And there is a subsequent controversy among the members of the audience as to what the books are about.

Throughout the years that I created these books one by one, some during periods of hypomanic happiness, others during periods of black despair, I paid little or no attention to these controversies except to now and then become hysterical and angry in my declarations as to what the books were trying to do. Lot of good that did.

Oftentimes what interested me in a particular book went entirely unnoticed by the readers talking to me about it, or writing about it. And certainly most of the newspaper and magazine reviews had little or nothing to do with my ambitions or whatever I might have achieved.

One could write a book about all this. Perhaps I will in the future. Right now I prefer not even to write a chapter.

What matters here is this:

These books transparently reflect a journey through atheism and back to God. It is impossible not to see this. They reflect an attempt to determine what is good and what is evil in an atheistic world. They are about the struggle of brothers and sisters in a world without credible fathers and mothers.

They reflect an obsession with the possibility of a new and enlightened moral order.

Did I know this when I wrote them? No.

But the research I did for them, the digging through history, the studying of ancient history in particular, was actually laying the ground for my return to faith.

The more I read of history - any history - the more my atheism became shaky. History, as well as Creation, was talking to me about God. The great personalities of history were talking to me about God.

In particular, the survival of the Jews, which I had studied so keenly for the novels Servant of the Bones, and Pandora, and Blood and Gold, was talking to me about God. I was seeing patterns in history that I could not account for according to the theories of history I'd inherited in school. I was seeing something in the survival of the Jews in particular for which there was no convincing sociological or economic explanation at all.

A great love of the Jewish people began to burn in me, a love of this tribe that had survived since the most ancient times into the present day. I conceived a fierce curiosity about them, and everything pertaining to them. I was drawn to them in their piety and integrity. And I wanted to know how Christianity had arisen from their religion, and how, above all, had it managed to take the Western world by storm.

If any one "thing" in all my studies led me back to Christ, it was His people, the Jews.

Now I had grown up knowing nobody who was Jewish, until a certain time in my early teens when an Orthodox Jewish family rented a flat at the end of our block. Our house faced St. Charles Avenue; their house faced Carondelet. How we became aware of them, I don't recall. I remember the father of the family singing in Hebrew, and my mother remarking that he was a cantor. She listened to him and drew my attention to listening to him, with palpable delight. She spoke of him and his family with a certain reverence.

At that time I was a member of the Legion of Mary, and part of what we did in that Catholic group was good deeds. I took it upon myself to babysit for the brilliant children of this Orthodox Jewish family when the parents went to the synagogue, or even out on the town. This was a good deed I did for no pay. The children included a brilliant boy named Benjamin and a brilliant girl named Clara. These children spoke probably more than three languages. I didn't know where they had come from but they told horrific stories of war - of houses wrecked, of rats jumping into cradles, of hardship beyond anything