DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711060622

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY DAVE PATON

                                            LENGTH:   55 lines

NOVEL'S SAD, PLOTLESS WALLOWING SOUNDS A FLAT NOTE

VIOLIN

ANNE RICE

Alfred A. Knopf. 289 pp. $25.95.

``What I seek to do here perhaps cannot be done in words. Perhaps it can only be done in music . . . my words should impart the very essence of the sound to you. If not, then there is something here which cannot really be written.''

With those less than promising words, Anne Rice's new novel begins, and indeed this tale of a modern-day New Orleans woman and a tortured ghost from Beethoven's age is a failure by Rice's standards.

However well described, music just does not come alive on the page. Worse, the vigor and pace that one expects from Rice are slowed to a crawl by her two lead characters, whose fussing and tossing in their private tempest grows wearisome well before the novel ends.

Triana Becker - who, with the same age and physical description, is Rice's most autobiographical creation - is confronted with the AIDS death of her second husband, Karl. She is no stranger to tragedy, with her failed first marriage, a young daughter lost to cancer, the demise of an alcoholic mother and the disappearance of a favorite sister.

Triana plays Beethoven's Ninth and leaves Karl's body in its bed a couple days. The day before he died, a handsome dark-haired man showed up outside her home on St. Charles Avenue. He returns, to play a violin that seems in its pain to sum up Triana's life.

He - Stefan Stefanosky - gives a benefit concert in town. He appears to Triana in her house. Why is he there? Why her? It's never explained clearly, to the novel's detriment - even if Rice is trying to achieve a dreamlike effect here, maybe imitate the ebb and flow of a symphony, there has to be a coherent and strong plot.

Rice's novels are all plot-driven, even those with the vampire Lestat or the others of her gallery of memorable characters.

Stefan knows her sad life story, her passion for music. He thinks, perhaps, that she wallows in her pain, and he wants her to know of his own tragic end as a man.

But he is corporeal, and so is his violin, a Stradivarius, an exquisite ``long Strad.'' When Triana wrests the violin from him, the novel becomes a gallery of images. He can reveal her misery, and she can see his. They rage at each other, and kiss. And so on and so forth, as Triana gropes toward the light at the end of her tunnel.

Violin, no doubt, has in it things that are important to Rice - music, artistry, her fascination with death, her New Orleans and world scenes. But it isn't very important or entertaining to anyone else, for once. Violin is a flat note, the song someone hums to you but you just can't get the melody. MEMO: Dave Paton is a staff editor.

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