SINGING HER PRAISES ANN PATCHETT WINS ACCLAIM FOR QUIRKY 'BEL CANTO'`.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

Ann Patchett is a lot like her books - sweet and funny, yet potentially biting.

She's the author of four books, including ``The Patron Saint of Miracles'' (adapted into a CBS telefilm - ``You would be a fool to sell your book to CBS for a movie of the week in hopes that it would somehow improve the quality of the book - given those expectations, I was pleased,'' she says). She has also written ``The Magician's Assistant'' and her most recent, ``Bel Canto,'' based very loosely on the 1996 terrorist takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, and which independent booksellers have named their third-favorite book of the year. Indeed, only Patchett could make something so terrifying seem so utterly regenerative.

In ``Bel Canto,'' unnamed terrorists overtake a vice president's palatial home in an unnamed South American country, and among the hostages are an opera singer and a Japanese industrialist who falls in love with her. Meanwhile, a Japanese translator is inexorably taken under the spell of one of the young terrorists. The New York Times exulted that ``Bel Canto'' was ``a novel that begins with a kiss and absolutely deserves one,'' while New York magazine called it a book ``about finding beauty in unexpected places,'' a description that could extend to any of Patchett's novels.

Yet only Patchett, in her sweet disdain, could make an interviewer feel so irrelevant: Learning that her interrogator is a TV critic, she laughs, ruefully yet flagrantly. She doesn't own a TV, she'll point out. The ``So what the heck are you doing here?'' goes semi-politely unspoken.

Prior to a reading at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, Patchett steps into a small room that contains, apropos of nothing, a giant foam head of Spot, the children's-book hero. Always looking for a different approach to her public readings, Patchett tries on the oversize noggin over her own. ``This is unpleasant,'' she reasonably concludes from within the oxygen- deprived environs of a foam-pooch's skull; the dog-head is discarded in the wings as she subsequently makes her presentation. Slightly less unpleasant, she decides, is an interview with someone who watches TV for a living.

All of Patchett's books, she'll agree, are sunny books about terrible things. ``I'm actually a pretty sunny person with some depth and am compassionate and am interested in darker, more complicated things without having a darker, more complicated life myself,'' she points out. ``And I am someone who, if I tell you a story about a car accident, I start laughing hysterically. It's just who I am - the worse things get, the funnier they tend to seem. Humor is a great balance for tragedy, so you throw some humor on it. I can't even imagine writing a tragic terrorist story, something that was just a downer all the way through - being gun-whipped and beaten and tied up all the way through. I just don't have that disposition and imagination for it.''

Patchett did a significant amount of research into Stockholm syndrome - in which hostages come to identify with those who have seized them - but even more into the nature of opera, of which she became a huge fan.

``I knew I liked the sound of pretty arias, but it was an extremely undeveloped idea,'' she says. ``I took on (my main character's) love for opera, to figure out this character while I was writing him. It seemed very important to me. Now, I just want to stand on the corner and proselytize about opera.''

And what if she had ended up hating opera? ``That happened on my last book ('The Magician's Assistant') - I got halfway through and got to where I decided I couldn't stand magic,'' Patchett admits.

``I thought it was - I hadn't really thought it through, it seemed sort of lovely, and gauzy, with the girl and the guy in the satin suit, but when I really started looking hard at magic, it's really cheesy and carnival-ish. There was nothing romantic about it at all. I wouldn't be caught dead at a magic show now. And to go from that point to write with great tenderness about magic was, as they say, a great trick.''

And yet, despite being able to write off on taxes her new-found love for opera, Patchett concedes, ``This book was chock full of limitations. There was no common language - a bunch of characters who are just looking meaningfully at one another for page after page, and can't speak. And no real setting, except this one room (in the vice president's home).

``And there's no time frame - that was the worst of it. It was a book where I did away with time. There was nothing compelling, and I never felt any clear sense of order about anything, and I put the book down many, many times, and would walk away from it for months at a time. That made it difficult.''

She continues, ``The way I work, I spend about a year putting a book together in my head. And when it's all laid out, I start to write. I do 95 percent of my revision in the first 50 pages. I'll throw out the 50 pages over and over and over again. Once I get that straight, then I'm on track, and I don't do a whole lot of revision. By the time I get to the end, I'm finished. I'll brush it up, but it goes off.''

At the very beginning of ``Bel Canto,'' Patchett lets the reader in on the tragic fate of many of the characters, and yet her story spins out compellingly for readers, even given that bleak knowledge. ``I call it the 'Love Story' principle - at the beginning of 'Love Story,' Ryan O'Neal is sitting in the baseball park, and says, 'What do you say about Jenny? She was a girl who loved Bach, Beethoven and me. Jenny's dead.'

``So you don't spend a lot of energy wondering if Jenny's going to pull through the cancer. You know she's going to die, and therefore your energy gets diverted to really paying attention to how beautiful she is, what a wonderful, small life she gets. And I didn't want people to read this book thinking maybe this is going to turn out OK. I wanted people to look hard at what, in fact, does turn out OK. And if the line works correctly, you either miss it or you read it and then forget it. I don't want this to be a thriller.''

Three of Patchett's four books have focused on entertainers of some sort - a magician's assistant, a bluesman, an opera singer. ``Maybe I'm writing about writing without admitting that,'' she admits, adding that a Russian character's speech in ``Bel Canto'' suggesting that appreciating art is an art form in and of itself is Patchett's own message to her readership.

``In fact, I tried to work that up as a reading in my bookstore readings,'' she says. ``In the book, it's one of my favorite parts of the book, but out of context, it's, 'Thank you for coming and enjoying my brilliance so much,' '' she says with a laugh, ``and that's a little too grossly obvious.''

`Bel Canto''

By Ann Patchett

318 pages. HarperCollins; $25

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(1) Author Ann Patchett: ``The worse things get, the funnier they tend to seem.''

(2) no caption (``Bel Canto'')