duringthereighOnce in a while, a serious reader of fiction has to grapple with a depressing question: how the hell has a great book been forgotten? In the case of Joan Chase and During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, it seems a matter of timing. First published in 1983, Chase’s debut novel inhabits farm-life with a lyrical voice, never settling on one narrator but instead—in a move that seems to anticipate The Virgin Suicides—telling the story from a collective “we,” drifting from one lingering memory to another. In the 1980’s landscape of “dirty realism” (Carver, Ford, Wolff) what chance did this novel—the stylistic equivalent of a feather—have? Expecting history to remember this book feels like expecting a child to notice a sunlit speck of dust floating in the room where he has just stumbled upon his parents having sex.

Happily, New York Review Books has rereleased this novel, giving history another chance. Like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, the story Chase tells of childhood—luminous, fractured, haunted by the voices of adults and maybe even the voice of God—reinforces that profound notion of fiction finding universality in its specifics. In this case, the narrating “we” consists of four young girls revealing life on their family’s farm, presided over by the stoic Gram and the slovenly Grandad. The girls are a pair of sisters, all roughly the same age: Celia and Jenny belong to Aunt Libby, while Annie and Katie belong to Aunt Grace. Never does an “I” surface, and which pair of sisters is narrating seems to change from one page to another without any cues from Chase. In one paragraph, the girls can speak of “our mother, Grace,” while, a few paragraphs later, this can change to “Aunt Grace,” a strategy that, at first, seems slippery but eventually reveals the novel’s true disposition—one of impressionism, not realism, the narrators coming to feel like four voices whispering into your ear, sometimes in unison, sometimes in cacophony.

To the degree that the novel has plot, it’s the story of Aunt Grace’s illness and eventual death, and how the family—her four sisters and their husbands, her mother and father, her nieces, her daughters, their distant father—deals with it. Chase reveals Grace’s eventual death early, and then circles the experience throughout five chapters, each focused loosely on a different member of the family. Time is difficult to pin down: adding to the fractured voice, each chapter has a different sense of narrative distance; sometimes the four girls’ narration seems retrospective, while at other times it seems immersed in the events. This is a novel without a present.

Chase moves from comic moments (adolescent sexual fumbling, absurd familial arguments over furniture) to harrowing ones (Grace’s death comes across with the clarity of Ingmar Bergman); from gritty intimacy (Aunt Libby, after being spotted with a Kotex dangling between her legs, tells the girls that “being female [is] a dirty business”) to folksy silk (“The cars out on the highway that sometimes splash the walls with their lights proceed like our thoughts, solitary and dreamlike, at a great distance”). Throughout all of this shines Chase’s astonishing attention to the details that sell her claustrophobic, Midwestern milieu: the exotic restaurants are the ones with wine lists; cursing makes the girls “feel bold and powerful”; a daughter lights a cigarette in front of her mother for the first time during a moment of crisis, and the mother lets it pass without comment; Gram uses this perfect phrase: “Reckon scandal borrows wings”; etc. etc. This is the sort of work where a reviewer is tempted to just list the things it recalls—Robert Altman (especially Three Women), William Faulkner, William H. Gass, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor (I mean, a character is named Grace), Marilynne Robinson—not to show off, but simply to communicate how high the work aims, and how little it disappoints.

The stakes finally suggested by this novel aren’t only life and death, but also good and evil—but this mounting grandiosity makes sense when the narrators, confronted with a half-understood story, “[make] up the details and [flesh] it out.” Joan Chase’s novel is a masterpiece about secrets, safety, the bond of family, women, and memory; it engenders aching nostalgia for a time and place that the reader never lived through—nostalgia even for events that the reader would never have wanted to live through—leaving one with the trace of a scent inhaled years ago that, somehow, still lingers in the air.