SEX AND VIOLINS

His answer, of sorts, to this question about Knopf author Anne Rice’s latest novel, Violin, her 18th: “The announced first printing of Violin was 750,000. Now it’s down to 400,000. What happened there?”

For the vast majority of authors, an initial print run of 400,000 would be cause for celebration. But Anne Rice, the queen of neo-Gothic horror fiction, with worldwide sales of over 100 million books, does not belong to the vast majority. With Grisham, Crichton, Clancy, and King, she belongs to the most exclusive club in popular fiction, a bankable brand whose name alone guarantees huge advances, first printings, and sales. She is the author of two hugely successful series of supernatural fiction, the Vampire Chronicles (five books) and the Lives of the Mayfair Witches (three books), as well as several books of historical fiction. Under the pen names Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure, she has written hardcore S/M pornography and softer erotica for more restricted markets (and advances).

According to published reports and her own coy admission last year on The Charlie Rose Show, Anne Rice’s current three-book contract with Knopf is worth $ 26 million. Let’s do some quick-and-dirty, dumb-guy math. Assume the entire print run (but no more) sells out. Four hundred thousand copies times the (rounded up) sales price of $ 26 per copy equals $ 10.4 million. The standard author’s royalty on the sales (15 percent) comes out to $ 1.56 million.

But, assuming a three-book $ 26 million deal, Knopf is paying her at a rate of $ 8.6 million per book. In this (ultra-simplifiied) model, she is being paid 5.5 times the market value for this book. This model excludes many revenue streams (book-club sales, pre-sold paperback and foreign rights, etc.) and all costs beyond the author’s advance (manufacturing, distribution, advertising, overhead, the booksellers’ 50 percent share of sales, and returns). But this book would need to sell in the vicinity of 2 million copies to “earn back” the author’s advance.

It is way too soon to pronounce Violin a vampiric, profit-leeching fiasco. Ultimately, readers will decide after the book goes on sale October 31, and Rice’s are legendarily devoted. But there are some bad omens:

The discrepancy between announced first printing (recorded on the cover of the advance proof) and the actual print order is unusually large, even allowing for the unrealistic sales puffery commonly reflected in the announced figure. The revised print order is low, for Rice. In comparison, the first printings of her last two books were 1 million for Servant of the Bones (religio-historical fiction) and 750,000 for Memnoch the Devil (fifth in the Vampire Chronicles series), according to Knopf’s associate director for publicity, Nicholas Latimer.

Publishers sell most of their books to retail chains like Barnes and Noble. “I can just tell you my buy was in line with about a 500,000 print run,” says Barnes and Noble’s Sessalee Hensley of her order for Violin.

The trade publications (often in the past friendly exceptions in a critical environment generally cool to Rice) have reduced Violin to splinters: “a disjointed and maudlin rumination on death, loss and rejuvenation” (Publishers Weekly); “soul mush,” “dreadfully in need of a caustic edit” (Kirkus Reviews).

Violin is devoid of the Vampires, witches, and evil incubi that populate Rice’s biggest sellers. “The book is not a vampire book,” explains Hensley. “The witches don’t sell as well as the vampires, and [historical novels] Cry to Heaven and Feast of All Saints don’t backlist as well as her books in” either the vampire or the witch series.

In an interview, Knopf’s Latimer wrote off the steep dive from the prospective first printing to industry-wide butterflies about falling sales, rising returns, and shrinking profits. Of course, a major source of book-biz indigestion is the mind-boggling author advances that publishers are eating. Typically cited are the lottery-winner advances for fluky, short-shelf-lived celebrities like Marcia Clark, not perennial commercial heavyweights like Rice. Her back titles sell consistently, and even if her current book is a turkey she may rebound with new titles that rival the sales of her backlist.

Even so, it’s possible that in a soft book market one can overpay, even for Anne Rice. But don’t blame Knopf. If anything in publishing is a sure thing, it’s Anne Rice. Born Howard Allen O’Brien in New Orleans in 1941, she changed her first name to Anne in the first grade. She changed her last name when she married her high-school sweetheart, Stan Rice, a poet. Her imagination was ” nourished on [the] stories of saints and miracles” of her Catholic girlhood in New Orleans. But her intellect left the church when she moved to Texas and entered college. I “discovered things like existentialism, [and] it was like emerging into the modern world,” she told Playboy.

In 1964, she and her husband moved to San Francisco. There, she acquired a drinking habit (“I didn’t see the end of my own dinner parties for ten years,” a sober Rice said in a 1994 interview) and won literary fame with her Interview With the Vampire, published in 1976.

Depressed and drinking heavily after the leukemia death of her 5-year-old daughter in 1972, she wrote this first novel in a five-week fever. When she wrote, she was unconscious of any psychological link between her personal grief and her tale of a vampire “family”: mischievous Lestat, melancholy Louis — and their vampire “daughter” Claudia, perpetually imprisoned in the body of a 5-year-old gift.

Rice’s popular fiction is a witch’s brew of blood, angst, wine-bar philosophizing, and you-name-it eroticism — homo-, hetero-, incestuous (filial and fraternal), even incorporeal. In The Witching Hour, mortal witch Rowan has the best sex she ever had — on a commercial airliner with Lasher, an evil spirit.

Critics have tended to dismiss her writing as overripe and underedited schlock that wants to be art. Rice returns the sentiments. “Book reviewing is a mess,” she told one interviewer. “It’s not like opera reviewing. The opera guy . . . can’t just go in and say, ‘Why are they screaming in Italian?’ But a book reviewer can do that: ‘Why are all these people vampires?'”

Rice’s fictional people are not vampires. But her vampires are people — and therein lies the originality and the source of the vast popularity of her Vampire Chronicles. She gave new life to a tired genre by turning its conventions inside out. In traditional Gothic horror, readers share the terror of mortals stalked by one-dimensionally predatory fiends. Rice’s reverse angle “reveals” the inner guilt and anxiety of the vampire. The vampire Louis, the hero of Interview, is torn between vestigial human remorse about the taking of innocent life and anxiety at his inability to surrender without apologies to his “natural” vampire appetite for fresh human blood.

Her vampires are complicated creatures, on endless, ultimately fruitless journeys of self-discovery. And they need to talk about their inner conflicts — and talk and talk. The vampire books are narcissistic down to their narrative form. In Interview, Louis spills his story to an interviewer with a tape recorder. In The Vampire Lestat (second in the series), the risen Lestat violates the vampire taboo on self-disclosure to mortals and tells all in the eponymously titled autobiography-within-the- novel. Rice anticipated the current vogue in publishing for transgressive, confessional non-fiction years ago in her fiction.

Rice is sufficiently fascinating to some to have spawned a derivative market in pop exegesis. There is an Unauthorized Anne Rice Companion, an Anne Rice Reader, companion guides to both the vampire and the witch series, and a biography, Prism of the Night. And there are the inevitable theories, mostly of the vampires-are-us variety, explaining her appeal. Her significant gay market sees itself reflected in the micro-culture secrecy and naughty night-prowling of vampire society. Recovering drug addicts and alcoholics see the vampire bloodlust as a metaphor for their own insatiable appetites. You get the picture.

Rice’s work combines the live-for-today hedonism of New Orleans (where she returned to live with her family in 1988) with the earnest, help-me-make-it- through-the-night self-exploration of her longtime home-in-exile, San Francisco. Hedonism (give in to your appetites) and self-discovery (validate your self-surrender) lie at the the heart of the cultural Left’s secular alternative to traditional faith and morality. It is pop fiction for a culture unmoored from its traditional beliefs by a pop writer unmoored from her own. (While Rice left the Catholic church, whether she escaped it is open to question: The abortion passages in The Witching Hour suggest she remains emotionally, if not politically, pro-life.)

Rice refuses to condemn her monsters. She tries to understand them. Or she aestheticizes them (her vampires are glamourous Romantic archetypes, Byronic, David Bowie-ish) to the point where moral evaluation is moot. Not exactly new. From In Cold Blood and Bonnie and Clyde, through The Godfather and The Executioner’s Song and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (a Rice fave), postwar American culture (high and pop) has long been alternately empathizing with and aestheticizing its degenerates and criminals. But Rice may have been the first to aestheticize and relativize our literal, make- believe monsters.

Daniel Bell famously argued that in a postmodern culture, what has been permitted in the imaginative realm will sooner or later be permitted in real life. Thirty years of imaginative understanding of our monsters, and ultimately you get — acquittals in the Menendez-brothers, Bobbitt, and Lemrick Nelson trials? Pinning that kind of thing on Anne Rice’s toothy predators would be a real stretch. Then again, this weird biting outbreak (Mike Tyson, Christian Slater, Mary Albert) might bear further study.

Denied the critical acceptance she craves, Rice has enjoyed the kind of mass adoration usually reserved these days for professional athletes, movie icons, and rock stars. Wrap-around-the-block lines of the faithful form for her major book signings, theatrical marathons in which both readers and author are apt to appear in cos-tume inspired by her work. She traveled in style on her last tour in a bus that once belonged to Willie Nelson. (She has another thing in common with the red-headed tax rebel: During last year’s presidential campaign, she published an open letter to President Clinton in Variety urging him to steal a march on Dole by embracing a flat tax.)

To grasp the size of her readership, consider these in-print figures from Publishers Weekly: Interview (6 million), The Vampire Lestat (3.1 million), The Tale of the Body Thief (2.3 million), The Witching Hour (1.9 million in mass-market paperback, 423,000 in trade paper), and Lasher (400,000). Rice received a $ 5 million advance for The Witching Hour (the first in the witch series) and The Tale of the Body Thief (the fourth installment in the Vampire Chronicles), and in 1993 she signed her next contract for $ 17 million, according to published reports.

Rice is generous and surprisingly available to her fans. She hosts annual Halloween balls for them in New Orleans. Gabby phone messages transcribed on her Web site update her followers on her plans and latest (sometimes batty) pensees — on movies, boxing, public affairs, her childhood, and the House of Windsor. “I hope Prince William and Prince Harry, I wish that there was some way I could express my feelings you know that wouldn’t be vulgar, you know, like an ad in the paper to just tell them learn from your mother, learn what it means, that royalty means something,” she mused in a recent bulletin. “It is not just, you know, the privilege to go play polo and say nasty things to the press. I think Prince Charles’ behavior towards Lady Diana has been despicable since the beginning of the marriage.”

But in interviews over the years, Rice has often sounded like one of her own unpacified spirits, suspended uneasily between genuine gratitude for her popular success and resentment of a critical elite that still giggles. She can be refreshingly unpretentious. A cinephile, she can admit to spending far more time nowadays watching videos than reading literary fiction (less canonical fiction than in her younger days, and virtually no contemporary fiction). She is often peevish in her criticism of contemporaries writing in different modes: “I have a real problem with much of the so-called literary fiction of these times,” she told Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore. “I have not read John Updike or Anne Tyler. . . . There’s a real arrogance to the pedestrian realism of the twentieth century novel. Not only are books about ordinary people and ordinary lives and ordinary events and little-bitty epiphanies . . . not worth reading most of the time, they’re simply garbage.”

Rice’s canon-envy lies close to the surface. Henry James’s “wonderful haunting novel” The Turn of the Screw was “just the beginning,” she told the New York Times. “I want The Witching Hour to be as great or greater than Henry James.”

While perhaps useful as a performance goal, James’s compact classic is completely unrealistic as a critical standard against which to measure herself. Close to 1,000 pages long, The Witching Hour tediously chronicles the saga (through four centuries and thirteen generations) of the Mayfair witch clan, haunted by Lasher, a demon who drives them to inbreed to create a witch powerful enough to permit him to occupy a human body. Here, the dislocation that makes the vampire novels interesting is absent: Instead of strange creatures facing affectingly familiar human dilemmas, the novel’s cast of idealized stock human characters is threatened from without by a malicious specter. Genre fiction minus pulp’s self-aware modesty, The Witching Hour labors under the technical defects that undermine even Rice’s best fiction: spongy, digressive plots, dialogue that poses weighty metaphysical questions in language all but deaf to the small variations of individualized speech, and inexcusably undisciplined repetition.

Knopf’s Vicky Wilson salutes the author’s “courage” for taking a “different direction” in the autobiographical Violin. “Some of this material I don’t think she thought she would ever write about,” she says. (Rice’s nominal editor, Wilson told me in a rare public acknowledgment that she “worked on the first few books” until Rice “said she didn’t want to be edited — it was too painful.”)

Whatever Violin is (dream diary? allegory about the artistic temperament? advice manual on channeling the dead?), this interview with Anne Rice’s id gives shlock a bad name. The plot? You had to ask. Okay, heroine (and author surrogate) Triana Becker is beside herself with grief over the recent AIDS death of her husband (she cuddles with his corpse) and tormented by feelings of loss and guilt about the long-ago deaths of her mother (from alcoholism) and young daughter (cancer). And, oh, she is tormented too by creative yearnings doomed to frustration by her meager talents (she always wanted to be a violinist). “Lord God, to be born with no talent is bad enough, but to have a macabre and febrile imagination as well is a curse,” she writes.

So anyway, a violin-playing ghost (Stefan Stefanovsky, a romantically melancholy 19th-century Russian aristocrat who died for his art and killed his titled father in the process, the selfish twit) arrives to beguile and manipulate Triana through the musical power of his magic Stradivarius. Triana steals her ghost’s “long Strad,” and with its aid becomes a world-famous violinist — an untutored, possessed, improvisational, expressionist genius adored by her fans. After oneiric excursions to Beethoven’s Vienna and Paganini’s Venice for some way-back-story on the mopey, parricidal Stefan, Triana ultimately heads to present-day Rio de Janeiro, where her deceased child may or may not have been reincarnated.

Almost as mystifying as the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t plot are the random changes in narrative voice. Triana’s first-person narration changes at whim into the second person. And in the second person, Triana may address the reader, her deceased loved ones, individually or plurally, or even herself, as in, “Dig deep, deep, my soul, to find the heart — the blood, the heat, the shrine and resting place.” And then sometimes there are just disembodied lyrical outpourings addressed to nobody in particular. For example, a paragraph in which Triana recounts how her younger sister had as a child sat passively for hours beside their mother who had passed out drunk on the front porch is followed immediately by this short paragraph:

“Shame, blame, maim, pain, vain!”

Disordered, therapized, incontinent, Violin is hard to read and harder to interpret. Had it arrived unsolicited at Knopf by an unknown, chances are it would have been returned to its author unpublished. Had I paid millions for it, I would not be eager to talk about it — and might just hang up on a reporter who was.

If New Orleans is ruled by self-forgetting and San Francisco by self- discovery, New York, where Anne Rice’s checks are cut, is still ruled by the bottom line.

Scheduled for publication next year is Anne Rice’s Pandora, the first novel in a series, New Tales of the Vampires.

Daniel Wattenberg, a contributing editor to George, previously wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.