Group Portrait

By John Skow

DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA

by Joan Chase

Harper & Row; 215 pages; $13.95

"The way Gram told it was that all I she had ever had in life was kids and work and useless men and what she wanted, and had earned besides, was to be left alone." Time sweeps everything along in its great, slow spiral: Gram's farm, Uncle Dan's butcher shop, Celia's beauty. People and houses move for a while with the current, then drop away to be replaced by hazy afterimages--family gossip, family myth. This musing, brooding, backward-looking novel, the author's first, summons up scenes of middle-aged women huddling over coffee across a kitchen table, talking in murmurs not always audible. It recalls the memorable time when Katie, who must have been about ten, wriggled under the stall door at the railway station bathroom. "Anne tried to pull her back, then went after her, only she was heavier and got stuck halfway and Katie was kicking her shoulder. When Jenny came with the dime, they couldn't get the door open, with Anne wedged under it, Katie still shoving her with her feet, just to be mean."

The book also talks about the year Aunt Grace got cancer and Aunt Elinor mobilized everyone to read Christian Science literature. It retells stories long since drained of humor or sadness but not of their power as talismans, like stones found in childhood that still cause a tingle when discovered in a drawer and held in the hand.

The title is dreaming and distant and just right. In the rolling land of northern Ohio, during the middle years of the 20th century, a woman of no previous wealth inherited a hatful of money, bought a big house and some farm land and assumed matriarchal ways. This was Gram, who had five daughters and, though no one seemed to think the fact very important, a husband. Her style was regal--she would stomp out at night to play bingo whenever she felt like it--and her son-in-law Dan the butcher called her the Queen of Persia. She sheltered, in her take-it-or-leave-it way, her unmarried daughters and whatever married ones happened, at any given moment, to have found their husbands redundant (men are minor irritants in this matriarchy).

Four granddaughters of more or less the same age rowdied about the house. They were two sets of sisters whose personalities were distinct enough but who formed until midadolescence a tribe more formidable than any single member. The novel's effective but highly unusual narrative voice reflects this collective consciousness. Scenes are related by "we," never by "I." When the reader notices this he may try to isolate a single speaker by elimination: Katie has crawled under the stall door, Anne is wedged there, and Jenny is looking for a dime, so it must be Celia. But no, we have established that it is not Celia. The speaker stays hidden, and her stubborn use of the first person plural makes the point that she and the others moved about the big house like fish in a school.

One sentence outlines the novel: "When we lived there, on the farm which was right on the edge of the city limits, we thought it the very center of the world, and the green and golden land and wooded hollows which began two blocks over from the railroad loop and then rolled off to obscurity formed a natural barrier to the rest of existence, which we dismissed as the outer darkness." The book that follows seems almost unshaped. It begins with what amounts to a separate novella describing how Celia's sexy good looks, which she was destined to lose uncannily at the time of her marriage, split her off at 14 from the sister-cousin cabal. Then it backtracks somewhat awkwardly in time to recount Aunt Grace's sickness and death. But ungainliness hardly matters when a box of old snapshots and mementos is to be sorted out. What does matter, and what Joan Chase evokes with great skill, is the magic of those stones and the haunting vulnerability of the old faces.

--By John Skow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.