Books like Belinda

So I learned two things about Anne Rice reading this—she's a shit writer with a cult following, and a disgusting excuse for a human being. The vampire books seem to be her niche, and when she strays from that, you can see just how remedial her skills are. It's like with E.L. James. People say, "Anyone could write this crap! I could write it!" Yeah, maybe you could, but you didn't. If James would've attempted to write a serious work of literary fiction, she never would've had a bestseller among the competition. But she wrote Twilight fanfic with almost-BDSM and a sadistic billionaire. She did it before everyone else would try to profit from such a thing. Similarly, Anne Rice created a voluminous world of vampires before it was trendy, making her a popular author. This book, Belinda, is slightly above the prose of E.L. James, but not as good as V.C. Andrews at her best. The narrator is Jeremy Walker, a 44-year-old children's author and illustrator who is wildly popular. He writes and illustrates these gothic children's books about little girls in gauzy nightgowns, wandering the dark stairwells of haunted mansions. His entire house is dedicated to his work. He photographs child models from agencies, develops the film in his basement, and paints pictures of them in his attic. Each room of his home is staged, with antique dolls and toy trains, an old canopy bed. These props end up in his book illustrations. He's at a book signing when he spots a teenager in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit who looks 15, definitely no more than 16. Jeremy tells us he has a history of fucking "street kids"—underage prostitutes that he pays generously, knowing he won't face consequences. But this one, this Belinda, seems well-educated, worldly, and wealthy, like she comes from a good home, so he's nervous. But he still invites her to an after party and sleeps with her right away.Then she comes to his house and chain smokes foreign cigarettes and downs a bunch of scotch like its water, and he finds out she's a runaway who is in fact 16. But she refuses to talk about her family or her past. So he ends up asking her to model for him, saying he'll pay her like he does the little girls from the agency. He has her wash her makeup off and model with a dollhouse in a little girl nightgown, and notes that she looks "like a 6-year-old" in the face, which gets him hard. He compares her to Becky Thatcher. She says she knew he always wanted to reach up under the little girls' nightgowns and how his work with children is erotic. He denies this, but still has sex with her in the little girl bed he has for illustrations. I'm so confused at what Anne Rice was going for when she wrote this. It seems like she wanted us to know Belinda is an adult, not a child. And okay, I could accept that. Honestly, I didn't look or act different at 18 than at 16. It's an arbitrary age, and most places in Europe consider 16 to be the age of consent anyways. I agree, if you're old enough to operate a car on the freeway without supervision, you're old enough to decide what you will or won't do with your body. So why all the overt pedophilia references if Belinda is a grown woman?Belinda is described as having a tan, slender body with a little boy butt and no hips, but big tits, so basically a Barbie doll... with a JonBenet Ramsey head, making her a woman-child sex Minotaur from hell. She's described as having tight skin around the eyes like a youngster, and it's continuously mentioned that she has a "babymouth"/"babylips." Jeremy calls her "darling baby" and "my little girl." He acts paternal with her, adopting her and buying her little girl clothes in a pre-adolescent style. He photographs her naked on a carousel horse, naked with dolls, and naked in a brass bed that looks like a crib before fucking her in it. He then dresses her to look like she's going to First Communion and builds a set in his home for the erotic photographs. If you don't know, First Communion is for girls who are 7-8 years old. He paints pictures of her in all these age-play scenarios.It reminds me of when Britney Spears was 16 and did those David LaChapelle shots for Rolling Stone. In one, she's in her bedroom with all her dolls, in a push-up bra top. In another, she's laying on a silk sheet in lingerie holding a stuffed animal. There is one of her pushing her little sister's tricycle, bent over in booty shorts that say "baby" on the ass. Of course Christina Aguilera was the same age, and a sexy young woman, but for some reason Britney was marketed to appear much more childlike than she was. She even popularized that naughty schoolgirl thing with the "...Baby One More Time" video. It was a very different representation than the "Genie in a Bottle" video of Christina's—which I can admit I found hot, because I was 16/17 myself when it came out. Fans who preferred Brit over Christina lost interest when she started acting/dressing age appropriate a few years later, even though she looked and sounded the exact same as an entertainer. There was a backlash against her not being their sweet little girl anymore. Christina didn't have a backlash, because she never played into that in the first place. This novel seems very didactic, yet it's a mixed jumble of messages. "Belinda is not a child, she's a woman in control of her sexuality. But she's also a child compared to Jeremy, and pedophilia is sexy." Jeremy definitely does not view her as his equal. The jacket sleeve says: "A contemporary Lolita, Belinda is the sensual story of a postmodern nymphet and her provocative relationship with her considerably older lover."How is she a nymphet? According to Humbert, who coined the phrase, a nymphet is a child aged 9-14, who has not yet began puberty. He found breasts, hips, and body hair utterly disgusting. Lo was a late bloomer, yet when she was 14 she was TOO OLD for him. She blossomed into a teenager, and he was trying to think of a way to get rid of her. But first he wanted to get her to Mexico and impregnate her, so he could start having incest with their daughter at age EIGHT, while he was still young enough to get an erection. Humbert wouldn't touch buxom 16/17-year-old Belinda, no matter what she dressed like. That's like expecting lesbians to enjoy sex with pretty boys. Pedophiles want kids, that's what pedophilia is. Like how hard is that for Anne Rice to grasp? She mentions Lolita three times, and Humbert on a handful of separate occasions, comparing them to Belinda and Jeremy. At one point Belinda goes missing, and Jeremy's friend says:"And I don't care how many teen sex flicks they crank out every day down there in Tinseltown, you're forty-five and you fucked a teenager and you won't say you're sorry, and your goddamn paintings are selling, that's what's making them mad. They've got to believe somebody's sorry, somebody's going to pay, so they just love the idea that she's dead.The link between sex and death, well, hell, it's as American as apple pie. For years every movie they ever made about gay sex—or any kind of weird sex for that matter—always ended with suicide or somebody getting killed. Look at Lolita. Humbert Humbert shoots Quilty, then he and Lolita both end up dead. America makes you pay that way when you break the rules."So, she's equating gay sex with Humbert's pedophilia? That's the same thing homophobes say. They compare sexually abusing a helpless child to two consensual adults having gay sex, because they think gays are equally deviant and morally bankrupt. And why would she keep drawing comparisons between her protagonist's romance and Humbert's kidnapping and raping of a child? Well, apparently she thinks rape is A-okay!She makes a joke about Roman Polanski "getting caught" with an underage girl, like they were lovers having an affair. Roman Polanski drugged a girl of THIRTEEN, and raped her. He performed oral, vaginal, and anal sex on her with her crying and begging him to stop the entire time. What the fuck is wrong with Anne Rice, seriously? She then has Jeremy say to Belinda that she looks "rapable" (which is not a word, but I'm assuming she meant rape-able) and Belinda says "thanks."Then Belinda's stepfather tries to hold her down and rape her, but she gets away and they make up. He couldn't help himself, you see. She's such a hot piece of jail bait, what man could resist?**At this point, you're probably thinking, "Tia, why did you read this?" Honestly, I thought it would be erotic, since it's written by a female. I always loved older men. Still do. When I was a teenager, I wasn't interested in boys my age. I ended up not having sex until I was in my 20's, and quite a few of my boyfriends were old enough to be my dad. But I was interested in men when I was a teen. It was a taboo fantasy that I knew better than to act on. I thought this would be a sensual story about a sexy older man, and I expected to be aroused by it.The problem is, Anne Rice is a male-identified woman. She tells the majority of the story from the male perspective, and objectifies the girl the entire time. She goes on and on and on about Belinda's blond, blond hair, her white-yellow-gold ringlets of fairy princess hair. Her candy-pink nipples and her candy-pink mouth and her tits and the "peach pink flesh" of her vulva and the texture, color, and shape of her pubic hair. We have to slog through Jeremy's midlife crisis and artistic breakthrough and endless guilt about having sex with this nice girl who has a family somewhere, but we barely know what he looks like at all. We never get descriptions of Belinda's pleasure. We never get any dick stats on Jeremy. He briefly notes that he had sex with another man, but doesn't describe it. He vividly paints with words what Belinda looks like in all his art, but in telling about the shots he took of them naked together, not a word for himself. The sex scenes are so vague, except one that details him pouring wine into her vagina. Sounds unenjoyable, and like a yeast infection waiting to happen. Belinda is your basic manic pixie dream girl. Jeremy spends the first 200 pages thinking about himself, then he finds out Belinda hasn't been honest with him. So he beats her while she cries and begs him to stop. The maid has to intervene, saying he'll "kill her." She's covered in bruises, and runs away. Then she mails him a journal telling him the truth about everything.First of all, this "journal" goes on for 100 pages of my 400 page copy. That's a fourth of the book! To say what could've been said in 5-7 pages. It's SO dull that I couldn't wait for Jeremy to take over again! And in describing her sexual history with men, she uses the same kind of detached language she describes her father with. But when she talks about her lesbian affairs, she's very precise in describing the other women's beauty. Interestingly, there are no masculine men in this entire book. There are many stereotypically flamboyant gays—a hairdresser with a sweet face, a guy who is slightly above five feet tall who wears lavender suits, sequin ties, and mink lined capes. Even Jeremy, the hero, has a house full of girls' toys and furniture and nightgowns. In Belinda's journal, she reveals she got on birth control at age 12, and she'd led a very promiscuous life with no repercussions. At age 15, she had a nude sex scene in a European art film with a woman that was not acting but "for real", had sex with that actress's girlfriend who was the director, and had an affair with her stepfather. Everyone around her was into having sex with kids, or at least with her because she's so beautiful they can't help it. I think this was Anne Rice's way of showing she was "mature" or not an innocent victim. All it showed me was that Belinda was surrounded by perverts. And at the end of the journal, Belinda forgives Jeremy—not for beating her, which she never mentions, but for making her open up about herself.He releases the erotic nude paintings of the underage and missing Belinda, and mean old "feminists" just don't understand him, calling it exploitation. But sweet baby Belinda marries him while she's still underage so her mother or uncle can't have custody of her—basically, she becomes his property as if he were her father. Jeremy often wrote in clipped sentence fragments like this:"Rain falling. Great slanted sheets of rain. Dark puddles creeping into the flowers of the rug. Voices downstairs? No.I was lying in bed with the scotch on the table next to me. Next to the phone. Been drunk since Rhinegold's visit, since I'd finished the new Artist and Model. Would be drunk until Saturday. Then back to work again. Saturday deadline for this madness. Until then the scotch. And the rain."But short as those sentences were, the book was about 150 pages too long. Anne just didn't know when or how to stop. And it's unfortunate that she compares Jeremy to Humbert, because monster that he was, at least HH told his tale in a compelling manner.