Most Famous American Authors

Alexander Chee: ‘As an American writing about Europe you have an obligation to do more.’ Photograph: M Sharkey

Literary writers are dreamers. They dream of rave reviews, of bestsellers, of respect and acclaim. And sometimes, as Alexander Chee does, they dream of their characters. Lilliet Berne, the protagonist of his new Queen of the Night, provided good fodder for reverie: she is, as the novel opens, a glamorous, feted soprano with “silences as famous as her perfor­mances”. Her “voice was so delicate it was rumored she en­dangered it even by speaking”. An anonymous composer offers what seems to be the role of a lifetime, until it turns out to be based on a past she thought she had outrun.

“My editor said, ‘I worry that you’ll never stop talking to her, that you’ll be like that sailor who gets trapped and dies at the bottom of the sea, ’” Chee said, meeting the Guardian in the cafe at the Center for Fiction in midtown Manhattan, where he works in the writer’s space on the eighth floor. “I worried about that very much myself.”

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If this sounds a bit fanciful, Chee doesn’t mind it. “It is looked down upon to speak in this kind of mystical way about things, ” he said. “But there were times when it felt more like a haunting than a writing.” The character followed him – or rather he followed her – for the more than 10 years it took him to write the book, which arrived last week from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to rave reviews in the United States, and is already in its fourth printing. Chee even ended up, improbably, on Late Night with Seth Meyers talking about his 600-page historical novel.

While in thrall to his character, Chee turned to other options in order to earn a living. He taught writing at Amherst College, Wesleyan University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he published non-fiction in the New York Times Book Review, NPR and other outlets.

His openness about the mechanics of publishing made him a popular presence online, too. He is a contributing writer at the literary website the Morning News, and also made frequent appearances at the Awl. He was, additionally, an early Twitter adopter, and has written frequently about the rewards and trade-offs of being a writer on social media. Among literary writers he is so notorious an evangelist for online spaces that, he told another recent interviewer, one night at McDowell his fellow resident artists chanted “delete your blog, delete your blog” at him, over and over again.

The fear of being associated with “lower” genres of writing seems to be a theme with him – as is the discovery that in fact these genres hold rich rewards for the writer. In a recent essay for the New Republic, he wrote that he found himself worried about being “tainted” by the low opinion of historical fiction, a genre that is now seen as filled with “silly novels” and shallow understanding of history. They run the risk of costume drama.

Ultimately, Chee made peace with his endeavor because the subjects pulled him so powerfully. “I did not begin writing about these times and people because I already knew them or their hair, or their powders, their buttons – I chose them because they called out to my imagination, ” he added in the essay.

But with that realization came, he felt, the responsibility to do his due diligence when it came to research. “Really, as an American writing about Europe you have an obligation to do more, ” he said. “Or at least I felt I did. They expect us to be stupid about Europe. I wanted to disappoint them. You do it all so that you don’t have the reviewer who says you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The first inklings of Queen of the Night came in 1999, two years before his first novel – a slim and contemporary bit of work – Edinburgh was published. Chee found himself collecting objects related to opera and especially the Queen of the Night, a character from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He had the libretto, a famous postcard image with that title from set designer Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 19th-century photographs. “I went to Metropolitan Opera and there in a big case was this costume from the Queen of the Night, ” he says. “I stood before it and it all just felt very charged, without me understanding why then.”

Soon afterward, the late writer David Rakoff told Chee a story about Jenny Lind, the opera singer known as the Swedish Nightingale. Lind had retired early and then gone on a tour promoted by PT Barnum that made them both very wealthy. (Rakoff jokingly referred to her as “the 19th-century Cher”.) Chee quickly decided that a fictionalized version of Lind might suit as the plot of a burgeoning novel.