The Queen of the Night review: The girl who sang her way over the sea

August 21, 2024

"The Queen of the Night," Alexander Chee's second novel — after his well-received "Edinburgh" — is an overstuffed picaresque that launches from frontier America and sprawls across 19th-century Paris, with fateful side trips to Baden-Baden, London and St. Petersburg. Its gorgeous prose style and ardent romanticism certainly suit the novel's protagonist, who, no matter how dire her circumstances, never forgets to tell us what she's wearing.

Indeed, as the curtain rises — and rarely has this metaphor been more apt — on diva Lilliet Berne in 1882, she has just decided that the Worth gown of pink taffeta and gold silk in which she enters the Luxembourg Palace is "hideous." She will have to leave the Sénat Bal as soon as possible.

Before she can, however, the famed soprano is waylaid by a writer who wants to tell her about his new novel. It’s about “the Settler’s Daughter,” a circus performer from North America whose singing moved Emperor Louis-Napoléon to present her with a ruby brooch shaped like a rose. The writer found this brooch hidden in his apartment in the Marais, he says, along with a diary that forms the basis of his novel. Now he plans to turn the novel into an opera and hopes she will originate the leading role. Will she cross the palace courtyard with him to meet its composer?

“Meeting the composer in this dress was out of the question,” declares Lilliet, who goes on to confide that her need for a change of costume was the turning point “when everything that came next in my life was decided.” Chee, too, has crammed into his first chapter practically everything he wants to develop in the story that follows. Silence as eloquent as speech, clothing as an assertion of identity and a means of disguise, life as a performance in masks, the different kinds of power wielded by men and women: These themes and many more wind through Lilliet’s narrative, which mingles past and present with the freedom of memory and the surreal logic of dreams.

Lilliet herself is, of course, the Settler’s Daughter. Or, rather, it had been her first role: “the girl who sang her way over the sea.” In Minnesota, she was a guilt-riddled survivor convinced that her rebellion against being forbidden to sing had caused her family’s deaths. In Europe, she reinvents herself over and over, changing names almost as often as her clothes. She leaves the circus and falls into prostitution, which the madam of her high-priced brothel insists is simply another kind of performance: “These men, they entrust us with their most secret fantasies. ... They rule the day, we rule the night.”

But Lilliet is more prisoner than potentate, especially after a Prussian tenor buys her from the brothel to groom as his singing partner, constantly reminding her that she is his property. She escapes by getting arrested, assuming the identity of a dead cellmate and being sent to a convent, from which she is dispatched as a maid to Empress Eugénie at the Tuileries Palace. There she encounters the love of her life, pianist and composer Aristafeo Cadiz, who quite understandably asks, “How many women are you?” And this is before she makes her triumphant debut as the soprano Lilliet Berne in 1872; she has to get through the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris first.

That’s a lot of plot, and the unmasking of its “secret architect,” who has been shaping Lilliet’s destiny since her brothel days, is regrettably anticlimactic. Chee’s novel will best please those who can enjoy its baroque complications without worrying unduly about plausibility, which is arguably a reasonable response to a text imbued with the extravagant ethos of opera. Other readers may find Lilliet’s musings about the nature of self, the workings of fate, etc., poetically phrased but ultimately insubstantial — rather like Aristafeo, whose role as her soulmate we must take on her word, as he remains a cloudy figure of romance rather than a fully developed character. “The Queen of the Night” is extraordinarily beautiful and dramatic, a brilliant performance filled with glittering scenes that never quite deliver the revelations they promise.

Wendy Smith is a contributing editor at the American Scholar and Publishers Weekly.

The Queen of The Night

By Alexander Chee

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 561 pp. $28

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLKvwMSrq5qhnqKyr8COm6aoo6NkwamxjKqsnp2eYrynedOhnGammZy1tXnRnq2inadiwamxjKCgq6RdrLWwedKapaBlmJq%2FbsPAsmSorpWnerW0xGaqnplfZ31ygo5paWhoYmSuo3yVcJqbnV2YhqV8jGponm1dbYWnsoyeaZ1pkml%2FeYXCa52Yq6Skv7p6x62kpQ%3D%3D