Pity, poor Anne Rice.
After raking in a fortune marketing her vampire-themed fiction to angst-ridden Goth chicks, Anne recently found God and has shifted to writing about a different fictional subject: Jesus. And now poor, dear Anne is crying and praying all the way to the bank because reviewers – and even her readers -aren’t taking her anywhere near as seriously as she is taking herself.
Two days ago, NPR’s Tom Ashbrook endured this excruciating interview with Rice on his show OnPoint, where she was pitching her latest offering; “The Road to Cana.” Their callers included the dean of the Divinity School at Lake Forest University, which to me is like being an expert on Harry Potter. Just because someone sucessfully memorizes the schedule of the train to Hogwarts doesn’t mean they are going to be riding on it anytime soon
You want irony? Rice dismisses the very idea of gay vampires, the protagonists of her earlier work, as “patently ridiculous” before turning one again to the subject of the water-walking, dead-raisin’, fig tree-cursin’ magical Jesus. But I am not convinced she has changed her characters all that much. For example, she describes Jesus as “a man over 30 who refuses to get married” and you can all but hear Depeche Mode in the background as she writes:
”[Is it possible that] Christ the Lord sleeps in a worn woolen robe, in a room with other men, beside a smoking brazier? Is it possible that in that room, asleep, he dreams? Yes. I know it’s possible. I am Christ the Lord. I know. What I must know, I know. And what I must learn, I learn. And in this skin, I live and sweat and breathe and groan.”
Notwithstanding any sweating and groaning, Rice was emphatic that no one should be reading between the lines and imagining any bodice-ripping or lustful carryings-on either. In her new books, anyone down on their knees is there to pray and nothing more. You got that Buster?
Managing somehow to cram her ego into the studio long enough to opine on her rightful place in history, Anne suggested that her work is part of “a long tradition of Christian art” and seemed receptive to the suggestion that people may very well adopt her writings over time as part of some future biblical canon. But for someone who sure talks as an expert in all things religious, she is woefully ignorant even to the origin of the derivitive and contradictory Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the current version. For the record, all of those writings came along a century or more after the time in which the Jesus story was set, and were given those names not as attributions but as simple titles.
Who knows? Perhaps in a few hundred years people will be quoting what she is writing today as they slaughter a village full of non-Riceans in the name of God, and wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “Lestat 3:16” to space-football games.
