During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase, Meghan O'Rourke (Introduction)

Overview

Set on a small Ohio farm, this “moving, unusual, and accomplished” multigenerational family saga is a “Norman Rockwell painting gone bad” as it explores grief, motherhood, and coming-of-age in Middle America (Margaret Atwood).

Joan Chase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The novel tells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of the family, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both a life-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonder what kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’s great trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’s daughter Grace.

A powerful story about family ties and tensions, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a book about place, charting the transformation of the old hardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590177396
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	04/15/2014
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	597,114
File size:	570 KB

About the Author

Joan Chase (1936–2018) was born and raised in Ohio. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in philosophy and history and later enrolled in the Writing Workshop of the University of Vermont. After being turned down by several publishers, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia was released by Harper & Row in 1983 and went on to win numerous prizes, including the PEN / Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction by an American writer. Chase was also the author of the novel The Evening Wolves (1990) and the story collection Bonneville Blue (1991).

Meghan O’Rourke is the editor of The Yale Review and the author of three poetry collections (Once, Halflife, and Sun In Days) and a memoir, The Long Goodbye. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Prize for First Fiction by an American author
 
Winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, given by the University of Rochester to women writers

“Moving, unusual and accomplished . . . During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is a Norman Rockwell painting gone bad, the underside of the idyllic hometown, main-street, down-on-the-farm dream of Middle America.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times

“A beautifully written novel of pain and pride.” —Rita Mae Brown

“Joan Chase is like an archaeologist of our recent past and present, reading our traces back to us, showing us to ourselves freshly discovered and understood.”
—Russell Banks
 
“Absorbing and wonderfully written.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
 
“Brilliant and compelling.... A lush lyrical world of unsparing reality.” —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
 
“During the Reign of the Queen of Persia offers an exoticism of the emotions and daily life exhilarated with the richness and evocativeness of poetry. It is also one of the few contemporary novels of women’s lives for which one need make no allowances, grant no compromised sympathy. Joan Chase hasn’t any message of visible politics, simply an artist’s passion for rendering reality accurately, a love of the tactile world, of sensual experience, and a willingness to confront, without resolving, her characters’ grievous ambiguities.... Splendid and durable.” —The Washington Post Book World
 
“Eloquent, compelling, and honest.” —San Francisco Chronicle Review
 
“Appealing and original.... Read the novel once for the characters, sorting out the strands of their lives, seen through eyes gone from innocence to knowing. It should be read again immediately for its language and imagery, the memory of a dappled sunshine, of the indomitable fierce Gram, and for its understanding of an endangered species called the American family.” —Detroit Free Press
 
“Remarkably original.” —Star-Telegram (Forth Worth)
 
“An absolutely first-class novel.... The candid viewing of events through four girls’ eyes is a wonderfully effective narrative technique that does much to give the book its rough-grained, realistic texture.... The novel, sparely elegant in style and precise in nuance, turns over our romanticized notions of our rural past.” —Chicago Sun-Times
 
“During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is beautifully written and evocative, with the most richly imagined characters I have come across in a long time. Its surprising choice of narrators—not I or he or she, but we—is just one indication of its originality.” —Anne Tyler
 
“There are several ways of interpreting Joan Chase’s remarkable first novel: as a romantic saga about life back on the farm; as the struggle of three generations of women against the forces of life and men; as an accomplished grouping of family portraits. But this is one of those books that can’t be characterized solely in terms of plot or thematic content, and one must emphasize the writing itself—not everyone can write this kind of prose. It is made of rhythms, images and metaphors that involve both sense and spirit and allow the reader, through the narrator, to experience a tone of the keenest excitement and awe.” —Chicago Tribune

“This is novelistic imagination with no elaborate scaffolding between reader and author — just direct immersion in a stream of subjectivity and life we come to know through that immersion itself…A novel so vivid, risky, and beautiful…from it we can learn to trust our stories — to finger the jagged grain of those trees in our childhood Edens, those lost orchards of memory — and let them take us where they need to go.” —Amy Weldon, The Millions

From the Publisher