Alexander Chee

I'm not really sure what to say about Alexander Chee's novel The Queen of the Night other than it is magnificent. A sprawling, epic tale that put me in mind of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, we follow Paris Opera sensation Lilliet Berne as she recounts her life from her humble beginnings as an orphaned American child, who tried to make her way to Europe to the only family she new of after the death of her family and ended up being swept up by one circumstance after another into the show more spectacle that was the Second French Empire. We follow her life from her time with a traveling circus, to becoming a prostitute in one of Paris' more prestigious whorehouses, to her time as a dresser for Empress Eugénie de Montijo at the Tuileries, until she finally makes her debut at the French Opera. Through this tale, she is trying to discover who might know of her secrets, as each time she took on a new role, she also cast off her old life and name and reinvented herself at each turn, trying to finally free herself from her own past and come into the life that she wants for herself.

Chee seems to have thoroughly researched his setting for Lillet's journey, and his writing is strong and precise. Lilliet's life is quite an adventure, but it never seems to be dull, and I never felt like I was wishing that her tale would hurry along. I listened to the audio version, and Lisa Flanagan's narration is spot on; she truly became the voice of Lilliet for me. The only thing that I added to my own listening of the book that I think could possibly benefit other readers is that I listened to selections of the operas and other musical pieces that are mentioned in the book, to add that next level of enjoyment to the story.

Chee is an extraordinary storyteller and I'll definitely be reading more by him in the future. show less

'The Queen of the Night' was my penultimate unread library book. I snatched it off the shelf in a panic on the Last Day of the Library, knowing nothing about it except that it's long. Thus I had little idea of what to expect. According to the cover The New Yorker called it, 'A postmodern bodice ripper,' which could mean absolutely anything. The circuitous first person narrative follows a woman through successive phases in her life, during which she has different names and identities. She is show more born in frontier America, then spends much of her life in Paris during the Second Empire, siege, Commune, and Third Republic as a maid, courtesan, and opera singer. The nonlinear fashion in which she narrated her tale was initially a little confusing, especially given the total absence of speech marks. (Parenthetically, I've come up with a theory that speech marks are the underwear of punctuation. You can go without them, but the rest of the outfit had better be well-structured and suitably covering or the overall effect will be embarrassing.) Once I got used to this style, though, I found the plot compelling. It is loosely based on opera, both within the reality of the book and from the author's note, so is perpetually melodramatic and overwrought. Combining this heightened atmosphere with the prosaic limitations of women's lives in the 19th century does prove interesting.

Once I got into 'The Queen of the Night', I was unsurprised by what I did and didn't appreciate about it. I liked the female friendships, details of clothing and grooming, intrusions of historical events (particularly the Paris Commune), and historical personages as background characters. The depiction of sex work in 19th century France is notable, as it includes details of how 'filles de carte' had to be registered with the police. I did not enjoy the perpetual exploitation of women by men, the excessively florid passages of our protagonist's emotional reflections, the romance, and the occasional modern Americanisms. I know the narrator is American, but they still jolted me. Ultimately, I did not find myself as involved as I would expect from such a lengthy first person narrative. There were definitely some interesting themes around exploitative relationships, shifting identities, and music as both constraint and freedom. However I found the narrative voice and complex machinations of the characters a little too mannered to be convincing. Many scenes are vivid and suitably theatrical, yet the whole thing seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. From the author's note, I gather 'The Queen of the Night' was partly influenced by Zola's [b:Nana|371456|Nana|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1174236758l/371456._SY75_.jpg|89633]. Perhaps I enjoyed it less as there are so many exceptional works of 19th century French literature to live up to. Sadly, Chee does not attain the standards set by Zola, Balzac, or Hugo. Nonetheless, I found the novel diverting and at times cinematic, very suitable for adaptation into a BBC miniseries. show less

This remarkable novel lines up with Ocean Vuong's later On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous as a most empathetic book about growing up as a gay male adolescent, and the author is also of Asian descent. It's like a many-chambered seashell, with the early chapters a painful look at pedophilia, which is not generally considered as directly connected to same sex love. It's also a tribute to friendship and to risk-taking, and to the positive influence of loving parents and grandparents and the awful show more results when those same relatives cause irreparable damage. The language and structure are deeply executed and memorable. show less

Alexander Chee's novel Edinburgh deals with some difficult issues, as the book's main character, Fee, struggles to deal first with the sexual abuse meted out by his choir master, Big Eric, and then, as he grows up, with his own identity as a homosexual man. Such problems, as one might imagine, run deep, and there is a repeated desire on Fee's part to destroy himself, just as so many others in his life have done.

As I was reading Edinburgh, I wanted to be moved by these themes. After all, if show more these issues were being told to me directly, by a friend, then I would certainly be touched. But the more I read, the more I wondered about Chee's choices as a novelist. The so-called "dirty realism" of the 1980s - think Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver - is a clear influence on Chee's style in this novel, which remains detached and economical, as if to counterbalance the melodrama of the story's content. The subject matter also occupies the familiar territory of dirty realism: sex, drugs, perversion, all the emotional fabric of everyday life filtered through the lens of the novelist.

There is always a twin danger when treading along the borders of transgression. The first danger, which Chee successfully avoids for the most part, is becoming too emotional, either through hysteria or sentimentality. The second, however, he does not, and that is the feeling that the reader is being blackmailed into an attachment with the story at hand. This feeling of emotional blackmail tells me that I ought to care about Fee because of his struggles simply because they are so weighty, that I somehow "owe" him something as a reader for this pain. But the truth is, I don't. He's a fictional character, and his difficulties are, in the end, made up. I would bestow my compassion on a real-life friend in Fee's situation because their pain is real, stemming as it does from the weight of experience. In the case of a novel, however, the burden lies with the author to make me care by drawing me into the story. That requires a certain level of narrative skill and seduction that Chee, presuming on my pity, does not enact.

The reality is that, in fiction, the heaviest misery comes cheaply. Writers can destroy cities, unleash plagues, wipe out worlds in the blink of an eye, all with a few strokes of the pen. Suffering - that is, imaginary suffering - is cheap because, without the sparkle of narrative interest, any reader can see that it's counterfeit, fake, made-up. The fact is that Alexander Chee is a product of the great MFA sausage factory of empty fiction writing. The writing thus sparkles with meaningless, "poetic" phrases that sound pretty when you read them but reveal absolutely nothing. Take these sentences, for instance:

"Blue. Blue because it's the color people turn in the dark. Because it's the color of the sky, of the center of the flame, of a diamond hit by an X ray. Blue is the knife edge of lightning. Blue is the color, a rose grower tells you, that a rose never quite reaches. Because when you feel threatened by a demon you are supposed to imagine around you a circle of blue light. You do this because the demon cannot cross blue light." (pp.191-2)

What on earth does that mean? Passages like these are fool's gold: they promise some kind of profundity, but the more closely you examine them the more you realize that they are nothing but decorative nonsense.

The greatest weakness in the novel, though, is the flatness of its narrative voice. There is nothing but surface in Edinburgh, no playful sense that our first-person narrator may be lying or mistaken or biased (he is too transparent, too insipid for that), no desire to explore alternative viewpoints or other voices. There was a moment - the advent, in the middle of the book, of another narrator - when I thought we were going to see inside the mind of Fee's abuser, but instead it turns out to be Warden, the abuser's son, who, in keeping with the novel's Narcissus references, is as dully monological in his admiration of Fee as the rest of the narrative.

So let's just say that Chee's attempt at blackmail didn't work on me. It's not that I'm heartless - but in the realm of fiction, where pain comes cheaply, you have to demonstrate some deeper reason to make me care. show less