On Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

This piece first appeared as the introduction to the New York Review of Books reprint of Joan Chase’s glorious first novel, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, which was released today.

Joan Chase is a musical writer, and in a sense her luminous, stark, and startling novel During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, first published in 1983, is a kind of pagan Middle American chorale—a song of childhood, a song of innocence turned (very quickly) to experience. The four girl cousins at its heart grow up playing “in the sun-shot darkness” of a barn that abuts a charnel field where their grandfather allows dead farm animals to rot. They run wild, jumping from hay pile to hay pile in the barn, studying the marriages of their aunts and their gram, playing strip poker; they visit their uncle’s butcher shop, where the “floor was scummy from the tatters of fat”; they do unnamed things with their older (male) cousin Rossie in the night; they eat ice cream and egg foo young laboriously cooked by their aunt grace; they chew on oat grass the way the men around them do. A great deal happens, and not very much happens. The sun-shot barn standing upon the charnel yard is a kind of central image for the novel, emblematic of Chase’s interest in the collision of the vatic and the grossly embodied.

One of the most remarkable things about this novel is its idiosyncratic form. It is narrated by a collective “we,” in this case the four cousins, who chronicle the summers they spend together on the Ohio farm of their unsentimental, hard-nosed grandmother Lil Krauss (née Bradley), the title’s “Queen of Persia,” in the 1950s. The cousins are two sets of sisters (“all of us born within two years of each other”) whose collective narration can’t be resolved into any single perspective. The five aunts come and go—pragmatist Libby, ethereal Grace, cosmopolitan Elinor, Rachel, and May—as do the women’s various husbands, but the girls are together so much that “sometimes we thought we were the same—same blood, same rights of inheritance.” The four girls are barely differentiated, though we are given some identifying details: there is the redheaded beauty Celia, her sister Jenny, and their cousins Anne and Katie, whose mother, Grace, is terminally ill for much of the book. (Anne is “the biggest and fastest with the toughest feet,” and Katie is sometimes “bad” for the sake of it, like her grandfather.) The collective first-person narration could easily feel mannered, but here it is essential, a device that allows the book to move forward and backward in time fluidly, in an almost Faulknerian manner, foregrounding sensual perception over the rational armature of recollection, and underscoring the novel’s preoccupation with memory. The book has a dreamlike quality of immersion, as if time were not a river but a pool. Though the novel is divided into five parts, each of which ostensibly focuses on a different character or pair of characters, the divisions feel a bit arbitrary; what is important here is the communal. The adults are the medium in which the children move, the walls they bounce off in their search for understanding the world. One remembers this feeling from childhood.

Indeed, it’s girlhood that is Chase’s most powerful subject. Until relatively recently the literature of American girlhood consisted most famously of children’s books, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series and (if we expand our category to North American literature) L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. During the Reign of the Queen of Persia animates the violent eros of girlhood, capturing the way it is by turns visionary, antic, sensual, and cruel. The novel is a reminder that innocence and experience are always entwined. From the start, childhood, in this novel’s depiction, is inflected by insinuations, cravings, and rude awakenings. The girls fight and claw; the aunts, provoked, competitive, call one another “bitch” before making up and cooking dinner, leaving the girls to run outside in “the tutelage of the wild and natural world,” while Gram presides. (In her distanced resignation she is more like an old and remote household god than an apple-cheeked template of female warmth.)

In particular, Chase has a delicate feel for the way that girls—especially those on the cusp of adolescence—are attuned to the lives of the women around them. The girls are close observers of the ways their aunts talk about men, including their uncles Neil and Dan, a butcher who gave up his dreams of living in California to support his family, and of course Grandad, a drinker who seems most at home with cows—the kind of man, we’re told, who might easily enough have killed someone. Menace hangs over the book: There is nothing of the cozy domestic about its multigenerational story. In a review in The New York Times, Margaret Atwood called the novel a “Norman Rockwell painting gone bad,” an apt description, though one suspects “gone bad” is a phrase chase might take issue with. One of the strengths of the novel is the way it holds up the family’s complexities almost without judgment; if the women are victims of their time, an era when feeding and clothing the family took much more hard labor than it takes today, so too, in their way, are the men.

Of course, in this sense During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a novel of place—specifically, of the ways that place shapes character and fates. The book tells the broader story of the changing demographics of rural America in the 1950s, and does so with an authority that grows organically out of Chase’s own life. She was born in Wooster, Ohio, which appears to be the model for the town described here; her father was out of work during the great depression and the family moved around in Ohio while she was a girl. During the Reign of the Queen of Persia lightly evokes a world where “lopsided buckboards vied with flying Oldmobiles for the right-of-way” and one still saw “the black-canopied buggies of the plain people, whose faces reflected the timeless, ordered certainty of their innocence.” (The novel quickly leaves any such certainty and innocence behind.)

Chase did not begin writing in earnest until after she married and had children; living in Vermont with her husband, she joined the Writers Workshop at the University of Vermont, and in the 1970s began working on what became During the Reign of the Queen of Persia while her children were at school, writing in a large closet she’d made over into a study. (Her husband, the writer Alec Solomita, notes that the closet was, if not “a room of her own,” a practical choice: “in the cold Vermont house, it was the place she could work in and stay warm with the help of a space heater.”) And in such ways novels are made. Of her three books, Chase is probably best known for During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, for which she received a PEN/Hemingway award. She also published The Evening Wolves (1991), a novel concerning a family whose mother has died, and Bonneville Blue, a story collection. Neither achieved the commercial or critical success of During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. In both novels, one detects the influence of Faulkner, a writer she read deeply for years before she began writing.

After the success of During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, Chase struggled to find a subject for her second novel. It would seem that she regarded herself as an intuitive rather than “professional” writer; as she said in an interview, “I did not approach writing as a career. It came along as a way of expressing myself, the first way I’d found suggestive enough, private and leisurely enough, to be worth the effort of approaching the complexities of living and giving voice to the situation. I never thought of writing as a way to earn a living but as a way of exhausting myself, engaging with my material, using everything I could find, inside and out.”

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia feels like precisely such a novel: less a plotted story than a deeply felt and powerfully inhabited symphony. Such a novel needs something to ground it, and here, unsurprisingly, it is the large opposing forces of sex and death. The novel opens after the death of Grace, as the girls, now teenagers, find themselves irresistibly drawn to sex. Celia, the eldest of the four, has suddenly become irresistible to men, though she floats through her own life almost tremulously, with all the indifference and unselfconsciousness of a nymphette. Boys tumble in and out of the house, to the chagrin and fascination of the girls and Celia’s own mother, Libby. One of the themes here is the danger romance poses: as Libby repeatedly warns the cousins, all too often a boy abandons a girl once he’s had his way. And even if he doesn’t, as Gram warns them, what happens next isn’t any good either. A girl who falls in love is likely to become a wife and a hardworking mother who forgoes her “promise,” a word that Gram—more given to cussing and gambling than to heart-to-hearts—uses with great gravity.

And so sex in this novel is the real truth of love. Sex is the charge that turns love, all too often, into hardship and conflict for both men and women. Lil plays Bingo every night, ignoring her husband, skittering away from home even on the night that her daughter Grace finds out she is dying of cancer. Lil likes to tell the girls she exited childhood at the age of eleven, when her mother sent her to help out a woman who was dying of tuberculosis. A sudden gift of money from a rich uncle changed her fate, allowed her to buy a farm and educate her children (rather than force them to work); her husband, one presumes, is allowed to stay on to milk the cows and keep things running. But the spouses are never reconciled, and till the end Grandad is a violent, unpredictable, malevolent force. One of the novel’s finest aspects is its depiction of the way the girls take this for granted, and both follow him around in fascination and avoid him with the delicate, self-preserving instincts of wise children.

But Chase is a melancholic in spirit—which is to say that she is alive, as an artist, to the intertwined nature of beauty and grief. After its long opening set piece about Celia’s suitors, the novel folds back in time to detail Grace’s terminal illness. It is here for me that the world Chase explores comes most alive, that its paradoxes and tensions are heightened, and that her poetic sensibility comes into focus, bringing a kind of high mythical shimmer to the fields and farmhouse and lives it describes.

Grace’s slow diminishment seems to make every piece of sun more beautiful and every shadow more threatening. Certainly it lends gravity to the girls’ impressionistic narration, one that might otherwise seem more incidental. The novel doesn’t shy away from portraying the violent ugliness of dying, a process that seems slower and more difficult than it should rightfully be, though it also leads Grace to an internal clarity everyone around her is half in awe of. “I have come to know that living and dying are a single event when considered by the mind of god,” she says, at one point—and it’s the work of this powerful novel to make you understand something of what she means.

Author photograph by Sarah Shatz