Little Snake

By Paul Gray

IN PRAISE OF THE STEPMOTHER

by Mario Vargas Llosa

Translated by Helen Lane

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

149 pages; $18.95

This small and distinctly peculiar novel was published in the original Spanish in 1988, just as its author began his long, ultimately losing campaign for the presidency of Peru. Now that it is available in English, In Praise of the Stepmother should raise again the question that readers have been asking for the past two years: Why would someone with the private talent and the exotic sensibilities of Mario Vargas Llosa want to enter public life at all?

The book's hero is Don Rigoberto, a well-to-do widower in Lima who has recently married Dona Lucrecia: "In his youth he had been a fervent militant in Catholic Action and dreamed of changing the world." The grownup Rigoberto has set his sights on a different goal: the pursuit of moments of transcendent personal pleasure. These he seeks in his nightly sessions in the bathroom, where, according to a strict schedule ("The Wednesday Ear Ritual"), he cleans and maintains a different portion of his anatomy; then he gallops toward the marriage bed for inventive trysts with the compliant Lucrecia.

But there is a snake in this hermetically sealed paradise, in the person of Rigoberto's son Alfonso. The lad's age is not specified, although when he runs up and hugs his stepmother, his head rests just slightly above her waist. Alfonso seems unusually ardent for such a little fellow. Lucrecia spots him spying on her through a window while she bathes; figuring that anything goes in this weird household, she puts on quite a show. When Rigoberto leaves for a business trip, Alfonso takes over as the man of the house. What will Rigoberto do if he ever finds out? And who would be foolish enough to tell him?

When answered, these questions generate some genuine pathos. Still, despite his professed admiration for eroticism in fiction -- his book of essays on Flaubert is called The Perpetual Orgy -- Vargas Llosa seems uneasy with the conventions of the naughty book. For all his celebrations of the flesh -- his own and Lucrecia's -- Rigoberto might have been happier if he had got out a little more, maybe even run for President of Peru.