During the Reign of the Queen of Persia:

...To start with, the novel adopts a composite perspective, based on the observations of two pairs of cousins, near-teenage girls whose mothers, aunts, and grandmother enact most of the drama Joan Chase settles the girls into two iron beds in the attic of a large old brick house on a mostly non-working farm...

...As in Eden, there is ordeal and education, trial and error, but also the possibility of transcendence Grace's dying, which provokes bitter stoicism, excites suggestions of immortality, illusions which only gain credibility from their emplacement within the mundane and palpable, as the girls observe: "We would often see Aunt Grace walking the back farm road, deeply concentrated...

...It substitutes for a file cabinet, hiding important documents and records, as the farm itself secured experience in its landscape Gram's resurgent pragmatism is reinforced by the novel's circular chronology, so that we finish where we began in time, a reassurance of perpetuity Metaphorically, if not actually, the Queen is dead Long live the Queen...

...But it is the auntly relationship, mirror of the cousinly diagonal, that provides the girls with models of distinction, endurance, and human bonding...

...Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences...

...There were the four of us," the composite narrator explains, "-Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters...

...The farm's richness helped to mark it as remote from the town, "a distance never calculated exactly because it wasn't a matter of space or time but one of difference...

...But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal...

...The farm's buildings reflect its division into two camps...

...Paradise it was, but after infractions had slightly dampened the level of perfection Ms...

...The sawn-off water-logged stumps he compared to the few men who dared to approach...

...As with James Agee's A Death in the Family, all other events in the story somehow feed into or flow from this singular happening...

...Even in death, the males' places were by no means certain...

...While the youthful narrators (daughters/nieces) speak with a single voice, the older women bloom in variegated profusion...

...Yet in its evocation of things fantastic, female, and finite, the designation couldn't be more apt...

...Though other tragedies (and other deaths) occur, it is Grace's death which both prompts and illustrates the closing-of-ranks among the women which sets them apart and secures the novel's viewpoint as feminine...

...Her obdurate stamina supports the family, necessary if unseeing...

...Or Aunt Elinor, a New York advertising executive who returns home from time to time to recycle her spoils -fashionable clothes, bright jewelry, new-found Christian Science beliefs...

...I don't know what the rest of us are supposed to do," commented Uncle Dan, after learning that his mother-in-law had bought cemetery plots only for herself and her daughters "Just wander, I guess Outside Paradise...

...While the barn belonged to Grandad, the house belonged to the women, "who held it by superior numbers and adaptability...

...Thus, there is Aunt Libby, compulsive seamstress and moral guide, who advises the girls to "Marry a man who loves you more than you love him," a formula they translate into "hard work and cold potatoes...

...The primary role, however, belongs to Grace, whose death is the novel's pivotal moment...

...Long live the Queen...

...The whole business works, wonderfully well: not as propaganda or complaint but as art, with all of the equivocations, excesses, and cacophony of life...

...None of this musing is allowed to suppress the battle to withstand and survive daily adversity, of course, well portrayed in the novel's conclusion, when Gram sells the house (a fire has destroyed the barn) and disposes of her belongings, retaining the Persian rug, not for its elegance but for its practicality...

...Their mother is matriarch of the manor house in which most of the happenings unfold, and Samson-like in her rage and strength...

...Fireflies like flying phosphorescent fishes sailed through the orchard Apples fell to their ruin...

...The newly cut grass was redolent of its raked crop and in the golden and purple passage of evening light over it we perceived again the incorporeal origins of creation...

...During the Reign of the Queen of Persia takes place in a small town in northern Ohio, for the most part during the 1950s The story (or set of spliced stories) is told from an unarguably feminine point of view, and reinforced by incorporation of several generations...

...Chase's tone evokes a tangible, lush landscape: "We were left in the kitchen with the black sea of night awash at the screens...

...The female charcters serve as the fulcrum for change and development, men as their foils Neil (husband of Grace) accurately reflects this distinction in his image of the moonlight, "falling in silent silver between the tangled trees in the orchard, fingers across the drive," which he said "reminded him of the familysome a little apart, on the fringes, a few tots here and there, the gnarled old crone in the center, and then the five sisters, close together, their slender branches intertwined, thrashing in any wind at all, making much ado about nothing...

...Once when we were coming home from the dairy with ice cream, we saw her from the highway against the backlight of the sky, there by the barn hill and to us it seemed her figure was silhouetted, a shadow, indeed the visible incarnation of a present spiritual being...

...Books: THE PRESENCE OF GRACE DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA Joan Chase Harper & Row, $13 95, 215 pp Rosemary Booth Here is a seemingly preposterous title for a first novel by an American writer whose context is Midwestern, middle class, and Protestant...

...We watched as if from the other side of a chasm, ice cream dripping down our arms...

...We could smell them softening in their own brine...

...The sororal solidarity of the onlookers is matched by an older generation of "the watched"-the five Krauss daughters who are the novel's main actors...