A Well-Tuned Instrument of the Macabre

“Lord God, to be born with no talent is bad enough, but to have a macabre and febrile imagination as well is a curse.”

So says Triana Becker, the heroine of Anne Rice’s latest novel. A plump, 54-year-old New Orleans housewife and failed violinist, she is gnawed by an exaggerated sense of guilt. Though no court of law would agree, she feels responsible for the death of her alcoholic mother, the death of her 6-year-old daughter from cancer, the breakup of her first marriage and the disappearance of her youngest sister.

Becker is speaking of herself, of course. But she might also be speaking of her creator, Rice, who is hardly talentless but does wallow shamelessly in the macabre. And she is certainly speaking of the ideal Rice reader--somebody who wants ordinary human suffering to be made romantic and luxurious.

As “Violin” opens, Becker’s second husband has just died. She goes half crazy, drinking canned soda and eating bread straight from the package, playing Mozart and Beethoven tapes, snuggling up with the corpse for days until the stench brings neighbors pounding at the door.

It’s in her description of this craziness that Rice’s talent shows. Between moments of lucidity, Becker relives the traumas of her childhood, longs to be united in the grave with her lost ones and imagines that she is communicating with a street violinist, a ragged but handsome young man who plays outside her house with transcendent skill.

Never mind how farfetched the details of all this are. What counts is Rice’s absolute conviction that there has to be more to life than everyday reality, “the fantasy of the Big Bang and the Godless Universe.” A half-century ago, Taylor Caldwell wrote of the utter certainty that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had destroyed American democracy--an idea that seems hardly less ludicrous today than belief in vampires, but its force made Caldwell’s novels, like Rice’s, bestsellers.

“Violin” has no vampires, as it happens, but the street violinist, Stefan Stefanovsky, is a ghost who also has a way of feeding off the living. He doesn’t drink their blood, but he draws strength, visibility and sustenance from their grief and their love of music.

And who has more grief in her, or loves music more, than Triana Becker? She is special after all, which is why she commands the attention of Stefanovsky, a pupil of the Beethoven she adores, a Russian prince killed in Vienna in 1825 after murdering his father in a struggle over the very Stradivarius violin he plays at her “cottage” in New Orleans’ Garden District.

Indeed, we soon begin to see that Becker’s suffering is of a highly privileged kind. She knew poverty as a child, but she now lives in a world of million-dollar legacies, family lawyers who call her “darlin’ ” and embarrassingly faithful black retainers. The “cottage” is, in fact, a pillared antebellum mansion.

And what an ego boost it is to have a soul so valuable that an aristocratic shade like Stefanovsky will devote all his charm and menace to subverting it, and that the shade of Beethoven, no less, will try to restrain him! Between bouts of anguish and floods of tears, Becker thrives on this. She seizes the violin, which is ghost-stuff but solid enough to play, and plays it brilliantly.

In ghost stories, the universe can work however the writer wants. In Rice’s universe, Stefanovsky can kiss Becker palpably but lacks the strength to take the violin back by force. He can only play on her insecurities--summoning images of her dead mother and daughter, insisting that her newfound talent belongs to the instrument, not to her.

Their struggle carries them across time and space, from 19th century Vienna to contemporary Rio de Janeiro. It’s a first-class trip all the way--grand hotels, palaces, opera houses--emotional arabesques without a letup.

No hint of irony is allowed to intrude. It was Mark Twain, not Edgar Allan Poe, who invented Huck Finn. Irreverence is as fatal to the romanticism of death as light is to vampires. In Poe’s universe, or Rice’s, children must be doomed waifs; they can’t saunter in, stick their fingers in their ears and chant, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,” or the whole thing would collapse.