Feel His Pain.

Mr. Teachout, the music critic of Commentary and a contributor to Time magazine, is writing H. L. Mencken: A Life.

Hannibal, by Thomas Harris (Delacorte, 486 pp., $27.95)

'The terrible thing about this world," laments a character in Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, "is that everybody has his reason." In fact, the really terrible thing is that everybody wants to tell you his reason, preferably on network TV. And while most of us know perfectly well that most of those reasons are merely excuses, the cultural elite begs to differ: In postmodern America, all hats are gray and the sole deadly sin is the making of value judgments about anybody who isn't a member of the National Rifle Association. This, I suspect, is why novels about serial killers have become so popular of late. You always know who the bad guy is-he's the one standing over the fresh corpse, clutching a bloody knife-and no matter what his reason is, it's not good enough.

Thomas Harris, creator of Hannibal (The Cannibal) Lecter, the eleven- fingered psychiatrist who dines on his clients, used to be particularly skillful at distinguishing between reasons and excuses. Dr. Lecter, formerly a permanent resident of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, goes out of his way in The Silence of the Lambs to inform FBI trainee Clarice Starling, his beautiful blonde nemesis, that he is not crazy but evil:

Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences. You've given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. . . . nothing is ever anybody's fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I'm evil?

Therein lies the source of the bad doctor's dark glamour: He never makes excuses for himself. This gives him a scary integrity that causes us to root for him when, at the end of The Silence of the Lambs, he crashes out of captivity and heads for South America, plastic surgery, and this bestselling sequel. Convention forbids me to reveal what you probably have already heard a dozen times over about the climax of Hannibal, so suffice it to say that after 468 pages' worth of increasingly unlikely sparring, Dr. Lecter and his lovely pursuer sit down to a delicious dinner for two and finally get to know each other- intimately.

Hannibal, alas, is not nearly so diverting as its predecessors, The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, and not as good a book. Part of the problem is that Harris fancies himself a serious novelist but is actually something very different, a popular novelist with serious intentions. Anyone who doubts his weighty purpose need only consult the Dostoevskian epigraph to The Silence of the Lambs, a verse from Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?" He makes much the same point in Hannibal, only this time in his own heavy-handed words:

How do you behave when you know the conventional honors are dross? When you have come to believe with Marcus Aurelius that the opinion of future generations will be worth no more than the opinion of the current one? Is it possible to behave well then? Desirable to behave well then?

These are, to put it mildly, awfully good questions, but to ask them in a thriller about a psychotic aesthete of immeasurably high intelligence who loves Chateau d'Yquem, human flesh, and Glenn Gould's recording of the "Goldberg" Variations (the 1955 version, no doubt) is to ask for trouble, which is just what Harris gets. Like Scott Turow in The Laws of Our Fathers, he has let his ends outstrip his means this time around, and the results, not surprisingly, are embarrassingly pretentious.

No less embarrassing, though far more surprising, is Harris's inexplicable decision to do something for which Dr. Lecter would happily have sauteed his sweetbreads: He dares to explain his antihero's obsession with cannibalism. It seems (brace yourself) that as a 6-year-old child in Lithuania circa 1944, young Hannibal was forced to watch as his younger sister was carried away and eaten by starving German soldiers. What possessed Harris to tell us such a thing? With this wholly unexpected revelation, the dignified demon whose credo is Evil, be thou my good shrivels before our eyes into yet another sympathy-seeking victim, the sort of fellow whose pain Bill Clinton would hasten to feel.

But, then, Dr. Lecter isn't the only one who holds a grudge. Thomas Harris was born in Mississippi, and early on in Hannibal he lets fly with a double-barreled blast at that old-time religion that leads you to suspect he must have spent more than his share of Sundays having it crammed down his throat. "God's choices in inflicting suffering," he writes, "are not satisfactory to us, nor are they understandable, unless innocence offends Him. Clearly He needs some help in directing the blind fury with which He flogs the earth." That sums up the main difference between Hannibal and its predecessors: The old Hannibal Lecter may have had his reasons for hating God, but at least he didn't whine about them.