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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 71BOOKS. . . And One With Vanity
By JOHN SKOW
TITLE: THE TALE OF THE BODY THIEF
AUTHOR: Anne Rice
PUBLISHER: Knopf; 430 pages; $24
THE BOTTOM LINE: A foppish bloodsucker gets conned out of
his socks in a narration that is very campy, very clever.
One of the better literary jokes of the past few years is
Anne Rice's portrayal of vampires -- actually gray-suited Pat
Buchanan-type homophobes who wouldn't risk a Paisley tie, most
of them -- as mincing exquisites. Boldly and impudently, she has
caricatured the gaudy world of high-camp New Orleans homosexuals
(so the reader guesses) as a cabal of tormented blood drinkers.
The mannered dress and behavior, the private recognitions and
ironies, the tireless naughtiness, the forbidden seductions and
ultimate sterility (vampires cannot breed, Rice assures us) are
carried over unchanged to the vampire world. So is a pervasive
and undisguised homoeroticism.
These sly borrowings, more evident than ever in this
fourth of the author's vampire tales, have worked brilliantly.
We're absolutely convinced, for instance, that Rice's star, the
blond, handsome vampire Lestat, is exactly the 200-year-old
bloodsucker he claims to be. He was the dark eminence in Rice's
first chronicle, Interview with the Vampire, and his monstrous
self-fascination has taken over succeeding narrations. Le stat
is something of a windbag, alternately luxuriating in the dark
perfection of his sin and then writhing in rather stagey shame
for his moral awfulness. This foppish introspection fogs the
early chapters of the present novel. But just before the
reader's eyes glaze over, the willful and impulsive Lestat
tangles with a mortal con man whose extraordinary psychic powers
let him cheat the vampire out of his demonic, enormously
powerful body.
Thus the plot: Lestat, in a male human body, charges about
the world with his mortal friend David Talbot, trying to
reclaim his vampire body. As usual, author Rice is eerily good
at making the impossible seem self-evident, in this case,
showing how painfully uncomfortable it is for the con man,
Lestat and finally Talbot to be stumbling about in the wrong
bodies. Of course there are a couple of breathless,
will-he-or-won't-he subtexts. Will Talbot and Lestat make love?
And -- the same theme restated -- will Talbot let Lestat turn
him into a vampire? It shouldn't spoil the melodrama to report
that in these campaigns Le stat scores one success, one failure.