Two novels about old ladies

Two older women, each formidable in her own manner, are at the center of gravity of two NYRB re-issues that I recently read and highly recommend: Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) and Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983). That similarity notwithstanding, the two novels could hardly be more different in tone and style. Mrs. Palfrey is a near-perfect comedy of manners, gentle and sad but with just the right touch of acid. Mrs. Palfrey herself is a widow who has just moved into a small London residential hotel for older folks of limited means. Loneliness afflicts every character, including Mrs. Palfrey. What she does about it constitutes a small act of heroism, laughable on its face but brave and audacious in its context. Taylor's descriptive writing is crisp and concise, and the dialogue pitch-perfect. An unexpected delight.

The "Queen of Persia" character in Chase's novel is the embittered, aging matriarch of a family of daughters and granddaughters living on and around the family farm estate in 1950s Ohio. Loneliness is not their problem– as often as not, hell is other people, including one's mother or sisters. The novel is narrated collectively– sometimes permutationally– in the first-person plural by the four granddaughters, two each by two of the daughters. This odd contrivance works brilliantly and somehow adds to the unsettled mood created by the nonlinear arc of the story through time. The introduction tells us that Faulkner was a major influence on Chase, and that certainly comes through, but her strikingly unconventional metaphors and lyrical, crowded descriptions are a style all her own.

During the Reign is unquestionably a book about women and girls– mothers, daughters, and sisters; the handful of men in the story inhabit the peripheries and range from kind and ineffectual to menacing. Like the women, the men are a source of curiosity for the granddaughters, who observe the grownups warily throughout the book. A vibrant, angry, poetic, and haunted novel. 

Do read them both!