Biography of X (2023)
Why this one?
I spotted it a few times on Instagram and literally everything about it sounded (and looked) cool. I’ve read nothing by Catherine Lacey before, so why not?
Catherine Lacey (1985- ; active 2014- ) was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. She studied at Columbia University, and was a founding member of a cooperatively owned B&B in Brooklyn, where she lived while writing her first novel, Nobody is Ever Missing (2014). It met with rave reviews and was included in many end of year lists. In 2017 she was included in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and in the same year she published her second novel The Answers (currently being adapted for TV by a team including Darren Aronofsky) and the nonfiction The Art of the Affair. A short story collection Certain American States followed in 2018, and her third novel Pew (shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize) in 2020.
Thoughts, etc.
Biography of X is an elaborately constructed fictional biography a female artist, author and musician known only as X. It is written in the persona of C.M. Lucca, X's widow, and supposedly published in 2005 as the conclusion of a decade's research following X's death and initially in response to another, inaccurate, biography. X is a chameleonic presence, a sort of David Bowie or Cindy Sherman, who takes things even further by fully inhabiting a dizzying range of other characters, particularly during the 1970s, a period she catalogues in her fame-making exhibition The Human Subject in which the concept of a single identity is mocked. During this period she crosses paths with or collaborates with a huge range of artists and personalities including the aforementioned Bowie, Kathy Acker, Tom Waits, and Susan Sontag, as well as lesser known characters like Connie Converse and many other partly or fully invented yet no less fascinating folks.
If this already sounds like a lot to take in, then the story slowly reveals its extra dimension, which is that it's set in an alternative history of the USA in which the country has split into three territories in 1945. After a female socialist (a alternative version of Emma Goldman) becomes president in the 1940s, the Southern states secede, becoming an isolationist theocracy and building a Berlin-style wall to prohibit movement. The Northern Territory continues along a more Utopian path, and by the 90s indeed seems like a much nicer place to live than the real US, with sexism and homophobia seemingly eradicated, prisons closed and free healthcare, but faces it continues to face its own issues and seems fixated on 'liberating' the South. The Western Territory is more neutral and libertarian, and less of a key focus of the novel.
As C.M. conducts her research her focus slowly shifts from simply correcting the record to understanding more about X's history and personality (and ultimately in some ways her own). By the time of her supposed writing, a tentative reunification has occured, and on an accompanied visit to the "ST" (like a tourist in modern North Korea) she discovers that X was born in the Southern Territory, in the year of seccession, as Carrie Lu Walker. She married young and had a child, but became caught up in a kind of terrorist organisation through which she managed to escape to the North. We also learn facts that complicate the view of the ST as simply a repressive theocracy: its initial vision was at least in some ways progressive, offering reparations for slavery being a notable example, and we find that ST activists were responsible for a bizarre feat of terrorism that saw the most prominent male names in experimental art (including Kandinsky and Calder) killed while female artists were left to thrive.
The novel continues in this dizzying manner, via a series of vignettes of different periods in X's history that captivate and fascinate while adding layer upon layer of complexity on to both her identity and to the initial contrast between North and South. There's far too much going on to capture in a short summary, but further along the way we see a Bernie Sanders presidency (which only comes to pass due to racist votes against his rival, Jesse Jackson), further revelations about X that call into question her allegiances, and a denouement that manages to shock despite its seeming inevitability.
This is without a doubt one of the most interesting and unusual books I've read in a long time. Its interweaving of reality and fiction is brilliantly done and impressively encyclopaedically researched. Lacey includes invented footnotes in the main body of the text, but there's a fascinating list of genuine footnotes at the very end of the book, outside of the main body, in which it becomes obvious just how much of the novel has its roots in real works, quotations and paraphrases. I'd emphatically advise not trying to refer to the latter when reading, as there's fun to be had in spotting the occasional one for yourself and also in just going with the flow without too much faffing around. As a music nerd, I noticed the liftings from Bowie's words (especially the fascist stuff) and a nicely reappropriated quote about David Byrne, gender-flipped like so many of the adaptations to adjust to the invented world. I'm less familiar with the writings of the artists and critical theorists mentioned, but it's a fascinating coda to browse through regardless.
For me, the obvious highlight (and probably the reason I picked it up in the first place) was the counterfactual stuff. It's a world I could have continued reading about pretty much indefinitely, but Lacey's deployment of it is impressively sparing. In part that's because it isn't the real point of the novel - she's described it in interviews as a really elaborate workaround to her desire to explore a relationship between two public figures in which gender power dynamics weren't the main driving force, and in which the fact of them being a prominent lesbian couple would also not be the driving concern. And yet despite this, what we do get is intriguing and complex. While the ST undoubtedly sounds like somewhere you absolutely wouldn't want to live, Lacey manages to allow us to find some empathy for its inhabitants, and while the North initially seems Utopian, its flaws are also all too evident by the novel's end. Others have commented that one of the odd things about this world are how many things are exactly the same, even down to specific lyrics to famous songs. I like the interpretation that there's a deliberate point in here - you can change the world radically, seemingly for good or for ill, and yet some things will turn out just as before. A slightly depressingly (and counter-revolutionary) conclusion, like much in X, but an interesting one to chew on.
Ultimately this is a book of layers, contradictions and conflicting interpretations of truth. At its heart is a devastating sort-of love story, in which the narrator slowly seems to be deprived of her own identity by the all-consuming nature of her more celebrated partner. X's own fixation with the erasure of identity (or at least the erasure of a single identity) means she herself can never give herself fully to any one person, which is a tragedy of its own kind no matter how little sympathy she generally evokes. It's hard to get beyond these kind of general musings with Biography of X - it's a book that is highly resistant to straightforward interpretation, and is best experienced as a kind of springboard to explorations of identity, love, art and societal constructs that is very open to the fact that there are no ultimate 'answers' to any of these questions.
Score
X (10)
I sort of toyed with marking it down very slightly on the basis of an initial frustration with the ending, but after a day’s pause I corrected myself. I was partly dissatisfied with the ending simply because I didn’t want the thing to end (!) and partly I think because this is the sort of book that is not going to ‘satisfy’ in simple terms: it’s not a genre mystery with a solution / answer, it’s a deep and thought-provoking exploration that asks questions of the reader and of our society as a whole. Brilliant.
Next up
The next Women’s Prize winner on my list, which is Lisa McInerney’s 2016 winner The Glorious Heresies.
