DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA
Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction by an American Author
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,
Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction by an American Author
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.
- NYRB Classics
- Paperback
- April 2014
- 240 Pages
- 9781590177150
Buy the Book
$14.95
About Joan Chase & Meghan O'Rourke (Introduction by)
Joan Chase was born and raised in Ohio. She graduated from the University of Maryland 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 in 1983 and went on to win numerous prizes. Chase is also the author of the novel The Evening Wolves (1990) and the story collection Bonneville Blue (1991).
Meghan O’Rourke is a poet and former editor at the The New Yorker.
Praise
“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
“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
“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…. Joan Chase [has] 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
Discussion Questions
What do you make of the way Chase presents motherhood and mothering in this book? Does daughterhood ever take importance over motherhood?
What do you make of the non-chronological sequence of the book? Summers seem to blend together in the narrative and memories zip through the text like starlings. Why might Chase present the story this way?
Chase divides the book into five sections, each for a character or couple: Celia, Grandad, Grace and Neil, Elinor, and Gram. Are these characters the most important in the book? If not, what do you think Chase accomplishes in giving them sections? Are the sections telling the story of each character, or is something else at play?
During the cheese scene in the Elinor section, the narrators tell us, “Aunt Elinor looked patient, as one who had seen a wider world, one she constantly made visible to the rest of us—accepting the fact that a wider world might mean a weaker place in the old one” (149). In what other ways does the wider world infringe upon the farm?
How does Chase treat death in this book? Does death become part of the landscape—simply another facet of the otherwise idyllic life on the farm—or interrupt it violently?
How are male characters treated in this book? Are they well-rounded characters with nuanced motivations and conflicts, or are they merely supporting actors, propping up the real work of the female characters? Does this change section to section?
The book is filled with hints of sex, but it rarely discusses the act in a straightforward way. When Gram talks about it, she talks about a violent burden, almost another level of daily abuse, but are there any values placed on sex other than the negative ones?
What does this book tell you about dependence and independence?