I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling

Oh! This one jumped up and threw the pronghorn around we-both and hung on rides ahead and wailed and thanked and sang grief for her long thoughts of his death, as spirit said a sister should, and felt his short hair against her fingers and cried more, wondering whether it was brother or father who died, and she cried for the starvation in his face. Rides ahead was a good brother (he was the son of two bears' younger brother, white elk skin, five or six winters older, a man already when this one was a child, and often speaking to her, but protecting her from black cheek and sometimes taking her up on his horse), and as a brother and a man should, he accepted her tears and let himself be fondled and hung on, and thanked for, keeping back his own tears, and his words. He said only, calmly, in the man's way (the ant-sting of hunger on his breath),--Walks slow, small mother, scar cheeks. We thought you were lost.

There are few stories as foundational to the myth of America as that of Lewis and Clark, speaking as it does to the country's vastness and wildness, and the intrepid nature of those who chipped away at its frontier. The coast at which they arrived was already mapped and more or less well-known by sailors and trappers, but the interior, which had recently been added to the United States by way of the Louisiana Purchase, was a blank map. In a way, every cross-country road trip is a kind of reenactment of the Corps of Discovery, who embarked from St. Louis on a journey through the continent just to see what was there--not to arrive somewhere, but to travel through.

In reality, of course, the interior of the country was well known to the Indigenous people who lived there, a fact acknowledged by the popular memory of Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who helped guide the Corps through the Missouri River and across the Rockies. Sacagawea is only mentioned a few a times in Lewis and Clark's journals, and they seemed mostly to have considered her a kind of emblem of peace--a woman's presence signaled a disinterest in war. There's actually something in the Sacagawea legend that's ahead of its time, in that it has always sought to "recover" the contributions of an Indigenous woman to American history. Such stories seem more common now, but Sacagawea may have been one of the first figures to be dredged up in this way. 200 years later, it's worth wondering what purpose the elevation of Sacagawea in the Lewis and Clark myth has served, and whether that elevation has in turn served Sacagawea. These two books--I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall and The Last Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling--both try to enliven the story of Sacagawea and make us see it in new ways.

Hall's novel takes its title from a line in Meriwether Lewis' letter to his old friend, William Clark, inviting him to join the Corps of Discovery. Though I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company is a novel of many voices--Clark, Sacagawea, Sacagawea's French-Canadian trapper husband Toussaint Charbonneau, and Clark's enslaved servant York all get a chance to speak--Lewis is at the story's center. In Hall's telling, Lewis is a mercurial and depressive figure who feels inadequate to the task of leading the Corps of Discovery, which President Jefferson has assigned to him more out of personal affection than a sober assessment of his abilities. Lewis is prone to long bouts of depression and frustration; he can't even work up the resolve to write regularly in his journal. His anxieties and fear of failure are self-fulfilling: his experimental boat (called, naturally, the "Experiment") sinks, the Corps faces starvation, then months of rain on the Oregon coast. On the way back Lewis is shot in the buttock by one of his own men, mistaking him for a deer, and he lies face down on the company's pirogue as it travels down the Missouri, embarrassed and ashamed. This Lewis would be surprised to hear that his name has hardened into myth. Few remember from their high school history classes that Lewis was shot to death under mysterious circumstances only a few years later, probably by suicide, after a disastrous governorship of the Louisiana Territory that left him broke. In Hall's novel, the suicide hangs over Lewis' character, as if worked out backward from his tragic end.

One thing that works about I Should Be Extremely Happy is the way it presents the Corps as a collection of colorful personalities: besides Lewis, the neurotic sadsack, there's the enslaved York, who present mixed feelings about the attention lavished on his skin and body by Indigenous people whom the Corps wants to impress. (Hall relies on an old and possibly true legend that York, after being cruelly denied freedom by Clark, ran away to live the rest of his life with one of the Indigenous tribes encountered by the Corps.) There's also Charbonneau, a shrewd scumbag, whose slimy and cynical sections are probably the book's best parts. Charbonneau, who was living with Sacagawea and another Indigenous wife near the Mandan villages in North Dakota, is hired as a translator, and is often in the forefront of the Corps' interactions with Indians. This, perhaps, is the biggest way that Hall subverts the myth of Lewis and Clark: by presenting it not as a story of traveling through wilderness, but as it was, a journey from tribe to tribe, begging for food, supplies, horses. What the Corps found in the end was not just rivers, plants, and animals, but people.

So, Sacagawea. Except for a short prologue, she's the first voice that appears in Hall's novel, narrating her capture as a child by the Hidatsa Mandan Indians that abducted her and sold her, in the end, as a wife to Charbonneau: "This one," Hall writes in a defamiliarizing imitation of Shoshone grammar, "was still a child." Her voice is a kind of pidgin, cobbled together from Shoshone and English, and though sometimes it's a little too hard to follow, it works, because it helps us understand Sacagawea's experiences as a kind of rough encounter with language; she slowly learns to understand the husband she does not want, and then the white "sun-men" who arrive at the Mandan village heading west. The story becomes one of restoration and return: after identifying the area at the headwaters of the Missouri as the place she had been abducted from many years ago, Sacagawea helped guide the Corps to the Shoshone camp where she was reunited for the first time with her brother Cameahwait, who had since become chief. It's a hell of a story, almost melodramatic, and Hall captures the sweetness of it well.

Here's the same scene from Debra Magpie Earling's new novel The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, where the presence of Cameahwait is deemphasized in favor of a communal embrace among women, all of whom, as far as I know, are invented characters:

Many People are coming toward me. They surround me and embrace me. Onion Wife makes her way to me and holds my hands so tightly I see Bia. The People, my People, turn to someone coming toward me. I see the top of her head before I see her.

She struggles to get to me.

.. I look .. I cannot believe .. I cannot believe .. I bite my fingers ..

Li-li-li, I shout. Women join me. Li-li-li-li-li-li, we call.

I cannot hold what overflows me. I am river.

It's easy to see the linguistic similarities between Hall and Earling's renditions. Both have sensed that a too-familiar language would elide the differences between us and Sacagawea; only a language that is, or feels, closer to the historical figure's will allow us to see past the myth into something true. Interestingly, in some respects they come up with opposite approaches: Hall places everything, including names, in lower-case, as if to emphasize the connection between names and things: "camas flower" is both a flower and a person. By contrast, Earling capitalizes more things and ideas, as if to elevate certain words to the level of the sacred. Some words that are too sacred are even italicized and printed in fainter type, to signify that speaking them endangers their sacredness and threatens to make them disappear. (As with the double-period "pauses," though, I wonder if a linguistic trick that needs explaining in advance isn't a little too clever.)

Lewis and Clark don't show up until late in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, which chooses to emphasize not the story of Sacagawea's return but the story of her abduction. Although Earling is as scrupulous as Hall when it comes to the historical record of the Corps of Discovery, most of The Lost Journals is, by necessity, pure invention. Young Sacagawea is, in Earling's telling, promised to a handsome young warrior named Blue Elk, which causes the tribe's jealous beauty to curse her, perhaps bringing on the violent abduction of the Mandan. Before she is violated by Charbonneau, Sacagawea is raped by one of her Mandan captors, reminding us that the myth obscures the fact that Sacagawea's presence with the Corps is ultimately rooted in sexual violence. Earling's Sacagawea is endowed with mystic powers, too, able to see the water monsters and ogres that are invisible to most people.

Earling's Sacagawea is defined by victimhood and violence, but she has a raft of helpers and allies as well, starting with a "White Man" who teaches her rudimentary English. These lessons are meant to explain, I think the nature of the novel as a literally written "journal," but it's an idea that doesn't quite do enough. Among the Mandan, Sacagawea finds a supporter in the form of a Two-Spirit person whose name--and yes, pronouns--shift along with the gender by the page. Those are fine, but I really hated the depiction of York, who sneaks away from the Corps to inform Sacagawea of how much he hates Lewis and Clark: "Makes me sick. I get sick every time I think about it. Because what they want is every goddamn thing! They ain't lookin' to discover nothin'. The reason these people are white is they already dead." Though Hall perhaps doesn't give us enough of York, saving his section until the very end, this version of York--who already innately shares a perspective with Sacagawea on the sacredness of the land and the futility of the Corps--is too didactic to be interesting.

As for Lewis and Clark themselves? They are arrogant, cruel, and rapacious. They believe that, by seeing and naming every place, animal, and plant they come across, they have possession of it, and by doing so they violate the sacredness of these things: "If we name things," Sacagawea writes, "we kille the gifts they offer." I would have liked the book to do more with the tension between this and Sacagawea's own "naming"; the faded words suggest that her journal puts her in a kind of complicity with Lewis and Clark, but the novel isn't quite bold enough to commit to such an idea. Lewis remains a pathetic figure, but not because of his doubts, but rather because of his confidence; when Sacagawea convinces her brother to provide the Corps with horses, it's because she knows they are too stupid to survive without them. (Something about this doesn't work right, because they are a little too evil: see Clark--who took in Sacagwea's son Jean Baptiste after the Corps returned--bouncing the baby on his knee and scheming to steal it from her.)

Still, the book ends with Sacagawea--jilted by Blue Elk, whom she had trusted to save her--deciding to continue on with the Corps to the coast, inspired by a vision of a whale. (This is one of my favorite stories about Lewis and Clark, which neither book is interested in putting on the page: they traveled down to the Oregon seaside to see a big beached whale, with Sacagawea insisting she had a right to see it just like anybody else.) Hall's book is either not very interested in why Sacagawea wouldn't stay with her family after returning, or it gets lost in the profusion of historical detail. But for Earling, it's key: Sacagawea insists on her own tour of discovery; she'll do it smarter, kinder, better.

Neither of these books quite worked for me. I thought Hall's attempts at capturing the various voices worked better than Earling's, which I sometimes found inconsistent and gimmicky. But I also found Hall too scrupulous about the historical record, and unable to separate the details that matter from the ones that don't: every little thing makes it onto the page, which means that every little thing gets lost in the deluge. And the decision to cut out the expedition's nadir, the miserable months-long idle at stormy Ft. Clatsop and the "Dismal Nitch," which are instead recollected by butt-shot Lewis face down in the boat, to be nearly unforgiveable. Earling's book is more imaginative, which perhaps is right, because figures in the margins of history will never be completely rediscovered by history alone. It gives Sacagawea a hell of a story, but what gets sacrificed, I think, is a more complex, and thus more interesting, version of the others: Lewis, Clark, Charbonneau, York. Reading them back-to-back made me feel that there's still a great novel about the Corps of Discovery to be written, and next time, please don't forget the whale.

The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar

For nearly half a century Zeno had used his mind, wedge-like, to enlarge, as best he could, the breaks in the wall which on all sides confine us. The cracks were widening, or rather, it seemed that the wall was slowly losing its solidity, though it still remained opaque, as if it were a wall of smoke and not of stone. Objects no longer played their part merely as useful accessories; like a mattress from which the hair stuffing protrudes, they were beginning to reveal their substance. A forest was filling the room: the stool, its height measured by the distance that separates a seated man's rump from the ground, this table which serves for eating or writing, the door connecting one cube of air, surrounded by partitions, with another, neighboring cube of air, are were losing those reasons for existing which an artisan had given them, to be again only trunks or branches stripped of their bark, like the Saint Bartholomews, stripped of their skin, in church paintings, here and there the carpenter's plane had left lumps where the sap had bled. The corpses of trees were laden with ghostly leaves and invisible birds, and still creaked from tempests long since gone by. This blanket and those old clothes hanging on a nail smelled of animal fat, of milk, of blood. These shoes gaping open beside the bed had once moved in rhythm with the breathing of an ox at rest on the grass; and a pig, bled to death, was still squealing in that lard with which the cobbler had greased them.

Zeno, a young man from a wealthy family in 16th century Belgium, leaves home to pursue a life of the mind. Stories of his exploits trickle back to his hometown of Bruges: he has become a renowned physician, treating those dying of plague, and his writings about philosophy and alchemy have been condemned by the church and burned. Later in his life, an aged Zeno decides to return to Bruges under the assumed name of Dr. Sebastian Theus, settling down to contemplate at last the nature of things. But Zeno/Dr. Theus is threatened by the raging fires of the Reformation; as splinter religions proliferate, the Church is all the more eager to punish those it suspects of heresy, atheism, and sexual deviancy.

What The Abyss captures, I think, is a sense of what we call The Enlightenment: the collapse of old structures and the rise of new ways of thinking, epitomized in Great Thinkers like Zeno, who is cobbled together from real-life figures like Paracelsus and Erasmus. This period produced some of the greatest advances in knowledge in all of human history, but it also produced a lot of battiness and violence: Zeno's estranged mother, for instance, gets caught up in the millenarian cult of the Anabaptists in Munster, led by the Christ-figure John of Leiden, and is killed when the cult is violently crushed. For his part, Zeno is one of those figures whose specific title or field--physician--belies an interest in the totality of the natural world, and a viewpoint that sees all fields as intrinsically connected.

The French title of The Abyss, L'Oeuvre au Noir, means "The Black Work" or "The Black Phase," referring to the phase of alchemical transition in which the substance of things is unmade so that it can be remade. (If you ask me, they should have stuck with The Black Phase as a title in English, too.) In a way, the black phase is what Europe itself is going through, and Zeno himself goes through a black phase when he returns to Bruges, captured in the section I quoted above: the nature of things begins to dissolve and return to its origins, and so the structures of Zeno's mind themselves begin to dissolve. In contrast to the wanderings of Zeno's life, it seems that the black phase is something you have to do on your own, alone in a room, and points toward the importance of Zeno's work as a physician, searching for truth not in the cosmos but deep within the human body itself.

I thought this "black phase" was the most compelling part of a book which, though really tremendously written, often felt elusive to me. I loved Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, a book which, according to her postscript, is similar in conception and in history--both books were put away for decades before being complete, and both of course are scrupulously researched accounts of history. It may be that I just don't have as clear a mental picture of the Holy Roman Empire as I do the Roman Empire of Hadrian's time; I often found myself meekly retreating to Wikipedia to remind myself who is who and what is going on. But the strangeness and richness of The Abyss is part of its appeal, and its depiction of a world that is different from our own simply because such great philosophical upheavals no longer seem possible.

A Journey to the End of the Millennium by A. B. Yehoshua

Seventy days and upward had passed since the ancient guardship had set sail from Tangier to ride the wild ocean waves so bravely toward a distant town named Paris, yet amid all the hardships that had visited the expedition, by sea and by land, Ben Attar had not known a single moment when he stood so alone, without rabbi or fellow worshipers, without business partner or nephew, without servant or sea captain, without horses or congregation, without even a house of prayer. Placed under a ban in the heart of an alien land, with his cargo-laden ship far away, pent up in the harbor of Paris. And all this a few hours before the start of the Day of Atonement, behind a little church built of grayish timbers, staring brokenheartedly at the wife of his youth wrestling with a fire like a servant while his second wife lay in pain in the house of an apostate physician. Although he wished with all his being that he could blame himself for what was befalling them all, because of his obstinate urge to demonstrate to the world the depth of his love not only for his two wives but for his nephew, he felt that he did not have the right, whether in defeat or in victory, to detract from the force of the destiny that had guided him, for good or for ill, since the day of his birth.

Ben Attar, a Jewish merchant living in North Africa, sets sail for Paris. Until now, he has done his business by sailing to Spain, where he would meet his nephew Abulafia. But Abulafia has recently married, and the new wife, a beautiful widow named Mistress Esther-Minna, has declared a repudiation--which, though I'm not totally sure what it is, carries a legal and religious force--on Ben Attar for having two wives. Incensed and eager to reestablish his business, Ben Attar intends to confront Abulafia's new wife, and has brought along both of his wives, along with a learned Spanish rabbi whose arguments will persuade her to drop the repudiation, the rabbi's young son, his Muslim business partner Abu Lufti, and an enslaved black boy--and a couple of camels.

All this happens against the backdrop of the coming millennium: not the millennium for Ben Attar, for whom it's the year four thousand-and-something, but for the Christians of Europe, who have been worked up into a fever in the anticipation of Christ's return. The Europe that Ben Attar moves through is a strange and foreign place, where he has trouble communicating even with the Jews, and where many of his former coreligionists have converted for fear of being slaughtered at the coming of the millennium. Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua treats this background with a light touch; it's never really at the forefront of the story, and yet it hangs menacingly over the merchant's journey. When his younger wife sickens, Ben Attar stops at the house of a converted physician in Verdun, and when he asks whether she'll survive, the physician says, She will live, but them--referring to a gathering of German Jews who have gathered to make a minyan for Rosh Hashanah prayers--they will not live.

There's much to admire about A Journey to the End of the Millennium: For one, I loved a glimpse of a a wide medieval world separate from the courtly hall or monasteries that you might expect to find in a book set in the Middle Ages. Yehoshua depicts a medieval Europe characterized by diversity and free movement; how fascinating to see Ben Attar work contentedly alongside his Muslim partner, at the same time he feuds with the northern Jews he cannot understand. In Ben Attar's slave child there are intimations of modern atrocity, but toward the book's end, we learn that Abu Lufti has restocked the cargo hold with blond, blue-eyed slaves from Eastern Europe, and we are reminded that this world is not one we can take for granted as familiar. I was also struck by the prose, with its long sentences and concentrically nestled clauses, which, if not medieval in style, seem charmingly antiquated. It's remarkably engaging for having a kind of intended stodginess, even more remarkably for containing, when rounding down, zero dialogue.

But more than this I was touched by the novel's picture of human desire and grief. Ben Attar is shrewd and businesslike, but deep down he loves both of his wives intensely, and the repudiation of his nephew has wounded him sharply. Abulafia, in turn, has married Esther-Minna in the wake of the suicide of his own wife, who has left behind their mute and troubled daughter. The uncle and nephew share both intense love and intense grief, and these qualities simultaneously drive them toward each other and keep them from being able to reconcile. Even Esther-Minna, whose repudiation is driven by the fear that her husband will leave her--for business, perhaps, or by taking on a second wife, like his uncle--is touchingly recognizable. While the Christians of Europe wait for the grand drama of the apocalypse to unfold, the North African merchant and his compatriots live smaller lives, more sweet and more painful because they are lived on a human scale.

Final note: with the addition of Israel, my "countries read" list is up to 82!

The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Among migrants, Homo sapiens is king. And yet we have little consensus on why we move around the way we do. The findings of continuous migrations throughout our deep past have upended the idea that we moved only once in the past, attracted by empty lands, but have left the central question intact: Why? Why venture into the oxygen-starved Tibetan plateau or set off on outrigger canoes into the waves of the Pacific? Why leave the comforting certainties of life in Africa, where food and water and other resources abound to this day?

Just the other day, New York mayor Eric Adams declared that migrants, which the city has struggled to house and provide for, could "destroy the city forever." His words were roundly praised by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and run-of-the-mill Republicans rushed to wag their fingers: even progressives are starting to realize that immigrants are a destructive force, invading our homes and mutilating our way of life. The rhetoric is shocking, but it's also tedious, because people have been saying exactly the same kind of thing for centuries, before New York was New Amsterdam. We are so familiar of this language of "invasion," as if people who want to live among us are actually conquerors, or perhaps viruses, but according to Sonia Shah's The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, such language is rooted in the mistaken assumption that our borders mark static places that contain natural populations which "belong there."

Much of The Next Great Migration is devoted to an intellectual history of migration, both human and animal, starting with Carl Linnaeus, whose system of binomial nomenclature reflected a belief that animals are rooted to the specific environments in which he found them. It's impossible to read these chapters without marveling at just how stupid we've been for so long. We used to think that birds spent the winter underground, until a stork showed up in Germany with an African arrow through its neck--in the spring of 1822. What Shah does really well is trace an intellectual history that shows how anti-immigration ideology is inextricable from scientific racism. The conviction of Linnaeus and others that animals don't move, when applied to human beings, long enabled the belief that migration is an unnatural act undertaken by the malicious or the desperate, and would result racial hybridization and the loss of genetic white superiority. These ideas show up again in later maniacs, like eugenicist Madison Grant and overpopulation hawks like Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, and Shah shows pretty convincingly that they represent an ideological chain that goes all the way to modern-day goblins like Stephen Miller.

What archaeological and genetic evidence really shows, Shah explains, is that migration is a fundamental part of being human. The longstanding belief that modern populations are the descendants of ancient populations that did not move, or moved in brief spurts and never again, is totally backward: the world populations that exist today are the result of millennia spent moving in every direction and by any means. Ancient humans moved over long distances and across difficult barriers, across mountain ranges and immense seas, peopling, for instance, the islands of the Pacific long before mainstream thinkers thought such intentional seafaring was even possible. (And evidence keeps accumulating even since the publication of The Next Great Migration in 2020: a set of footprints at White Sands National Park strongly suggests that humans arrived in North America long before the opening of the Bering Land Bridge.)

What is so remarkable about The Next Great Migration, I think, is that it addresses the scientific racists--who are still quite numerous and influential--on their own terms. It would be easy enough to reject Linnaean claims that human beings make up discrete populations whose survival is threatened by easy migration by saying that human beings are not like other animals, but Shah situates the human capacity for migration specifically in the context of plant and animal movement. The implications of this rebound against not only immigration restrictionists but invasion biologists: movement is a crucial part of the ecological history of plants and animals as much as it is human beings, and our ideologies about "invasive species" may do no better representing the truth about ecosystems than ideologies about invasive human beings.

For Shah's presumably leftish audience, this has to be the most difficult part of the book to accept. But Shah is really persuasive in saying that what you accept about humans you have to accept about plants and animals as well. Just as immigration restrictionists--and Eric Adams--exaggerate the potential harms of migration and minimize the potential benefits, so we ignore that movement replenishes biodiversity. Even some of the most maligned invasives, like zebra mussels, turn out to be excellent at filtering and cleaning the water of the Great Lakes. All of that is not to say that we should ignore the risks of introduced species--especially in more self-contained ecosystems like Pacific islands--but that a smarter approach might be more discerning about what the risks really are, and from which species. It might be one that understands that plants and animals have always moved around the globe, even without the help of human beings, and it might jettison the creepy language and assumptions of the GOP.

It's hard to ignore the silent term in the title: The Next Great [Climate Change] Migration. The next century promises to be one in which the world changes, ecologically and politically, faster than ever before. To face it, Shah suggests, we'll need to let go of stale ideas. We will have to decide what it means for a plant to be "native" in an ecosystem that has gone from having a continental climate to a subtropical one. We will also have to figure out how accommodate the millions of people who will be on the move, doing what humans have always done, but perhaps in even greater numbers and a faster pace. Will we welcome them with a place to sleep, or razor wire? Will we fear them as destroyers or welcome them as neighbors? 

Justine by Lawrence Durrell

I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on thte periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit. But she herself--austere and merciless Aphrodite--is a pagan. It is not our brains or instincts which she picks--but our very bones.

An unnamed Irish writer begins an affair with Justine, a beautiful and enigmatic Jewish woman who is the wife of Nessim, a wealthy Copt. The pair betray not only Nessim, who is the narrator's friend, but the narrator's lover Melissa, a Greek dancer who suffers from tuberculosis. These four live in Alexandria of the 1930's, a cultural and political crossroads where nationalities, classes, and even sexualities mix freely. Alexandria is--ugh--almost a character in Durrell's novel, the first in what's now known as the Alexandria Quartet, and Durrell's depiction of the city mirrors the depiction of the affair: cloistered, full of shadows and secret places, a city of cryptic and hidden urges.

Justine, too, is cryptic, prone to saying things like, "Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged." OK, Justine! Many times, the narrator and others suggest that human personality is an outgrowth of environment, and that Justine therefore is, in her sensuality and mysteriousness, a kind of purest expression of Alexandria's character. (It's no accident that, in the postscript, after--spoiler--Justine has gone away to work on a kibbutz in Israel that she grows stout and unattractive.) The narrator, Justine, and Nessim are all members of a secret group that studies the Kabbalah (did you know the word "cabal" comes from "Kabbalah?") and their investigation into the mysteries of the sacred realm echoes both their secretive inner personal lives and the political scheming that, we come to understand, goes on in Alexandria.

The prose in Justine is remarkable. It struck me, in fact, as the prototype for a style that a lot of writers have attempted and failed: intricate and sensual, perhaps even downright sexy, one which reflects the inner intensity of the doomed love affair. I found the plot, like Justine's aphorism, a little cryptic. The narrator explains that he will report events as their impact revealed himself to him, rather than chronologically, whatever that means. It didn't make me want to read the other novels exactly, but I know that at least two of them cover the exact same time period from the point of view of minor characters, and I wonder if reading them would give me a finer appreciation for Justine, whose nature felt sort of elusive in the end.

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase

If we met Aunt Grace as she went about the farm on her long solitary walks, we--still dancing and running, coming out of the flowing, dazzling pleasures of the brook, the embrace of vines and roots, the sting of grasses--would fall into silence. Then talk awhile, but carefully, self-consciously, answering her few questions, her smiles with our smiles. At the edge of our awareness we glimpsed the white wrapping at her throat, breathed carefully so we wouldn't smell the abscess underneath. There in the dust-silted track by the barn, ankle-deep, we buried our bare toes, sprayed geyser figures into the air to fall away. While we talked with her, it seemed that our hearts burned within us, as if we were with someone who had come to love the world, inexpressibly yet without entitlement. We made some excuse and ran away. Left her alone to concentrate her entire being toward making manifest the sufficient love of God.

The "Queen of Persia" in Joan Chase's novel is Gram, the matriarch of a large Ohio family and the ruler of her farm house, so called because of her imperious nature. The farmhouse is a woman's world: although various men have become attached to it through marriage--Uncle Neil, Uncle Dan, even Granddad, a hard-drinking old bastard who prefers the company of his cows--they seem to occupy an outside orbit, around Gram's many female children: Aunt Libby, Aunt Rachel, Aunt Elinor, Aunt Grace. Another generation, Libby's daughters Celia and Jenny and Grace's daughters Katie and Anne, grow up in the farm house, coming slowly to understand their forebears as they do.

The One Big Trick of the During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is that the novel is narrated by all four of the younger girls at the same time, as part of a "we" that moves through the farmhouse, observing the older characters. This allows Chase to "peel" off narrators as needed, as she does, for instance, in the novel's first section, where the eldest Celia begins to separate from the other three as she gravitates toward the attentions of men. It's impressive how well this trick works, actually, moving between first and third persons, the individual and the collective.

"Celia," the first section, is actually the last, chronologically speaking. From there, the novel moves backward in time, reintegrating Celia into the narrative foursome, and taking up what might be said to be the real thrust of the novel: the slow decline and death by cancer of Aunt Grace. It is Grace's illness, actually, that brings the various characters together, those who live in the farm house and those who don't, and the illness's demands bring out the complexities of the various characters: the hardheaded fatalism of Gram, the hopeful religiosity of Aunt Elinor, who applies the Secret-like precepts of her newfound Christian Science to Grace's condition, the cynical clowning of Grace's desperate husband Neil. It's Neil that delivers, after Grace's death, a resentful speech we realize is a bitter truth, referring to his daughter Anne, but also the entire family:

"Nothing else anyone will ever try to do for her will ever mean anything, never be enough. She'll always be dreaming about this place and this time, looking backward. Could be all of us should have gone on and died right along with Grace. Might none of us will ever be quite alive again."

On the back, the New York Review of Books compares During the Reign of the Queen of Persia to Marilynne Robinson (not really) and Alice Munro (yes). That's rarefied company, but well-earned. Even beyond the nifty perspective shifting, Queen of Persia is filled with effective prose. Chase has a special ability to describe the look on a face. There's Uncle Dan's face, which "looked as though it had rained all his summers, his eyes gray from clouds that passed over his heart." And Aunt Rachel's, which, as Grace is breathing her last, "shone as though it were a shell clarified in the sea." And I was floored by, after a description of Grace's wasting and mastectomy, the girls' thought: "We wondered how she could still looks so alive with all that gone."