Anne Rice Returns to Porn
How sad. How sad and how terribly dull.
Anne Rice has returned to the porn business. The erstwhile Catholic and author of the first second-wave vampire novels in the 1970s and 1980s, Rice has republished the Sleeping Beauty trilogy, three books full of repetitive sex, spanking, and S & M. They are based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. It's pure crap, a quickie cash-in based on the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon, and Rice ought to be ashamed of herself.
The three books, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, and Beauty's Release, first came out in the 1980s, under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure. Take any one of the books and open it to a random page, and you'll find something like this: "Again she arched her back. Her breasts were suffused with red. As he drove his organ into her, he felt her shudder violently with unwilling pleasure."
Add spanking to the scene, repeat 847 times, and you have the Sleeping Beauty trilogy. You don't know repetitive until you've read this books. It's as if Larry Flynt were twelve years old and had ADHD and Tourette's.
In a new preface, Rice tries to justify republishing these books. It's the same-old porn-as-liberation boilerplate. "The books aren't about literal cruelty," she explains. "They're about surrender, the fun of imagining you have no choice but to enjoy sex."
Think about that sentence for a few seconds. Ah yes, the fun of being raped. Of course, the victim of this, the character Beauty, is set free: "Beauty's slavery is delicious sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating." Right.
There's nothing wrong with a well-crafted sex scene, but the best ones have some subtlety and humor. The great model Lauren Hutton once revealed in an interview that she enjoys sex more in her 60s than in her 20s. "You learn how to steer the bus better," she quipped.
Then there's this great moment from Savage Night, one of the best works by crime master Jim Thompson and one of the first sex scene I even read. In the book one of the characters meets a women who has a deformed hand and bad foot that requires a crutch: "All that work and deep breathing had put breasts on her like daddy-come-to-church. And swinging around on that crutch hadn't done her rear any harm. If you saw it by itself, you might have thought it belonged to a Shetland pony. But I don't mean it was big. It was the way it was put on her: the way it hinged into the flat stomach and the narrow waist. It was as though she'd ben given a break there for all the places she'd been shortchanged." There is more humor and even grace in that paragraph than in Rice's entire trilogy.
After her hefty vampire books, Rice adopted a style that is much more minimalistic, and it is interesting that this tone works very well in her religious books but not her erotica. Rice had a few years where she reverted to Catholicism, and during that time she wrote a couple novels about Jesus. Compared with the stuffy language of the King James Bible, the thin and light sentences of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt took on a cool and effective velocity, like Haruki Murakami but with less skill.
It also had a plot that kept you reading; you knew that Christ's life was going to be eventful, whereas in the Beauty trilogy it's just a matter of who's on deck for the next spanking.
But then, I sense myself getting repetitive even in trying to describe Rice's repetitiveness. It's all so tame and cliched and done-before and pseudo-radical. Any idiot can spank someone. It takes a real soul, and a real writer, to open themselves up to making love.
