“THE QUEEN of the Night” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Alexander Chee’s second novel, fifteen years in the making, is a sort of postmodern bodice ripper. On its opening page, Lilliet Berne, famous across Europe as a soprano and as a courtesan, arrives at the Senate Ball, in Paris’s Luxembourg Palace—the year is 1882—and suddenly realizes that her gown is all wrong. When she put it on, at home, it had seemed nice enough—a confection of pink taffeta and gold silk, by Worth—but, seeing it in the light of the palace’s blazing chandeliers, she says, “I nearly tore it off and threw it to the floor.” She doesn’t have to, though, because among the guests are two dukes, brothers, whose sexual interests, she knows, are limited to slicing off women’s gowns with…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 22, 2016