. . . 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. Lestat 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 Lestat scores one success, one failure.