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."