Full disclosure: I can't stand Anne Rice. I mean, yes, on the handful of occasions I met her, she was a lovely and charming woman, but her writing...well, lovely and charming it ain't. Even back in college, when I spent many a night dancing gloomily to Front 242 at the Blue Crystal--even then I thought she was a sloppy, slovenly hack. Her popularity completely mystified me.
But today I figured it out.* Today, in an interview in the Picayune, Ann Rice has inadvertently explained everything and made clear (at least to me) her intent to follow the American zeitgeist all the way to the bank--no matter the pit stops it may make along the way:
On leaving New Orleans: "My only beloved son was in Los Angeles, and I felt like moving out to California was a good thing to do."
Did you catch the reference? Do you see where this is going?
On the success of The Da Vinci Code: "I'm so outraged by it," she said.... There's not a scrap of evidence to support any of those theories."
Yeah, baby. Work the angle.
On the possibility of writing another Lestat novel: "That book will only be written if I can keep my commitment to the Lord," she said. "If I can work out a book where Lestat is saved, yes, I'll write it.
Bingo.
Having ridden the Gothic wave until it finally petered out at the threshold of a Claire's Boutique somewhere in Missouri, Anne is now totally hot for Christian schlock and George W's ballyhooed Base. She's bid adieu to the slim-hipped young men, attracted by her daring views on homosexuality. She's bid adieu to the plus-sized women, clad in crushed velvet, who often accompanied the slim-hipped men at book signings. She's bid adieu to everyone drawn into her parallel universes of inverted but somehow totally right-on morality, and she's gunning for Wal-Mart employees and the Songs of Praise demographic.
Which is not to say that vampire novels and biographies of Jesus Christ don't bear similarities to one another: they're both intriguing myths chock-full of blood-guzzling. In fact, if I were so inclined, I could give Ms. Rice the benefit of the doubt and presume she's trying to modernize Christian ideology by working from the inside out. Sadly, I am not so inclined.
Nor is it to say that a person can't appreciate these two divergent styles of Ms. Rice's work (three, if you count the A. N. Roquelaure erotica). Such a person may well exist, but I wouldn't wanna be his therapist.
Anyway, given Ms. Rice's stated and unstated intentions, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess at her immediate goals:
1. Buy an abandoned church and start her own denomination (working title: International House of Ann-cakes).
2. Trample Dan Brown on the bestseller lists and leave behind those Left Behind guys.
3. Enshrine Christopher in the literary heavens (just below her), so that he'll be wealthy and well-connected enough to care for her in style throughout her waning years.
* Her son's popularity, however, continues to boggle my wee mind.
