This piece first appeared as the introduction to the New York Review of Books reprint of Joan Chase's glorious first novel, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, which was released today. Joan Chase is a musical writer, and in a sense her luminous, stark, and startling novel During the Reign of the Queen of Persia , first published in 1983, is a kind of pagan Middle American chorale—a song of childhood, a song…