Publishers Weekly
★ 01/30/2023
Lacey follows up Pew with an audacious novel of art and ideas set in an alternate late 20th century. It comprises a book titled Biography of X, which was published in 2005 by a journalist named C.M. Lucca. That book’s subject, X, a pseudonymous multidisciplinary art star, reaches cult status as a novelist in 1973, when she’s in her 20s (in one of many deliberately anachronistic references, X receives fan mail from a yet-to-be published Denis Johnson). Later, X travels to West Berlin to record with David Bowie, and, back in New York City, becomes a controversial performance artist. Lucca meets X in the mid-1980s, and they marry in 1990. Same-sex marriages are legal, thanks to progressive advances decades earlier pushed through by Emma Goldman, FDR’s chief of staff. Goldman’s agenda, though, led to a Southern secession in 1945. Shortly after the country is reunified in 1996, X dies from an unspecified cause. After an unauthorized biography of X is published, Lucca embarks on a project to set the record straight. She begins in the small Mississippi town where X was born, which X kept a secret to protect her from agents of the Southern Territory. As Lucca conducts interviews over the next several years, she begins to doubt how well she knew X after all. Lacey does a brilliant job convincing readers of Lucca’s chops as a reporter, even as Lucca becomes unhinged. The author also perfectly marries her invented history with her study of a shape-shifting artist, with X refashioning herself both to escape her ultraconservative homeland and to build a vehicle for her creative expression. This is brilliant. Agent: Jin Auh, Wiley Agency. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Lacey imposes a truly outstanding narrative authority on her pseudo-biography . . . the audacity of this book . . . seems likely to bring her to a much wider audience. If this does mark Ms. Lacey’s deserved elevation to mainstream attention, she has accomplished it without diluting the vital qualities of confusion, yearning and mystery." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"[A] staggering achievement . . . [a] masterpiece about the slippery nature of art, identity, and truth." —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
"Brilliant, astonishing . . . The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse." —Chris Kraus, The Washington Post
"Genre-quaking . . . A true magnum opus . . . [X is] an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature." —Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic
"In its boldness of premise and execution, Biography of X goes above and beyond, under the river and through the woods. It flaunts world-building skills that the writers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” wish they’d had . . . Lacey is one of the most fearless novelists writing today." —Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times
"Haunting, genre-bending . . . It’s like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary – an avalanche or alien invasion – is taking place in the background . . . A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered." —Marcel Theroux, The Guardian
"Lacey has done such a brilliant job of making X impossible to envision, impossible to feel or grasp . . . There is an ambition in The Biography of X that’s thrilling not least because it shows how endless, how elastic and expansive—at a time when so much storytelling feels constricted, tight and close on a single consciousness—fiction can be." —Lynn Steger Strong, The New Republic
"A Scheherazade-like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating . . . Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X, it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Lacey’s fifth book bursts with urbane vitality. The author convinces us by the sheer inventiveness of her artifice . . . Biography of X is the author’s most ambitious and enjoyable novel yet, filled with the subversive humour and verve only hinted at in her previous books . . . Catherine Lacey is clear-eyed about human dependency and self-delusion." —Jude Cook, TLS
"a towering work that comments on, among things, art-world ridiculousness, the elasticity of identity, culture divides in the United States, and the fool’s errand of compressing a life into narrative . . . Beyond the book-as-book exercise, Lacy’s inventiveness when describing X’s various attention-grabbing exhibitions, and the genius visual annotations, Biography of X consistently stuns on a sentence-to-sentence basis. This is a wise, wise work." —Rich Juzwiak, Jezebel
"Lacey artfully blends historical anecdotes—X is seen penning songs for David Bowie and attending openings with Richard Serra—into her fictional universe, making uncomfortable connections between X’s fragile world and our own." —The New Yorker
"Bold and exhilarated, figuring itself out as it moves forward, an act of raucous creativity." —Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis StarTribune
"Brimming with negative capability, intrigue, and erudition, Biography of X is at once a tense, tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale for the United States and a robustly supported argument for the idea that biographical knowledge alters the reading of an artwork." —Jenny Wu, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Lacey is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them . . . in Biography of X, she has reached a new level of understanding." —Emma Alpern, Vulture
"Biography of X is criminally good, building on [Lacey's] previous five books’ fascination with the mutability of self with kaleidoscopic depth and astonishing propulsion . . . What is most spectacular is Lacey’s sleight of hand, inviting us to become engrossed in the unknowability of others, while gently reminding us that we, too, are unknowable—even and especially to ourselves." —Ayden LeRoux, BOMB
"Sweeping, ambitious . . . too expansive to simply be called a novel . . . The book is a provocative project—one that mirrors and refracts our own cultural obsession with celebrity and our nation’s broken politics." —Sammy Loren, Document
"One of the most inventive works I’ve read in a long time, Catherine Lacey’s latest novel is a must-read for fans of ambitious, genre-bending literary fiction." —David Vogel, Buzzfeed
"Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph." —Kirkus (starred review)
"An audacious novel of art and ideas . . . The author also perfectly marries her [character's] history with her study of a shape-shifting artist, with X refashioning herself both to escape her ultraconservative homeland and to build a vehicle for her creative expression. This is brilliant." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A dazzling literary chimera, at once an epic and chilling alternate history of the United States and an intimate portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams." —BookPage (starred review)
"A tour-de-force in literary and artistic realms, this engrossing story of breakaway artist X will challenge readers on many levels." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Lacey's tale is a lovely meditation on not only the mysteries of grief and love but also the equally mysterious ways of the creative process." —Booklist
"Sly, brilliant, philosophically acute, bitingly funny, and a pure joy to spend hours with . . . Suffice it to say that it feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X, Catherine Lacey somehow—magically—makes the nearly impossible look easy." —Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
"I'm not sure I know another novel that manages to be so many books at once: a biography revealing masks beneath masks and faces beneath faces, a quest narrative unsure of what it's seeking, an impossibly ambitious parable about art and the enigma of others, an alternate history of America that serves as an X-ray of our own fractured country. Biography of X is a profound novel about love and what it can license, about the toll—and maybe the con—of genius. Only Catherine Lacey could have written it." —Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You
"Biography of X is the most ambitious book I’ve ever read from a writer of my own generation. Epic world-building revealed through intimate emotion and dangerously honed sentences; a story that mixes fact and fiction to create a new register of truth, a register that belongs entirely to Catherine Lacey. I'm awed." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
"Biography of X is a triumphant high-wire act: all the breadth of a 19th century classic with the propulsiveness of a psychological thriller. I stayed up too late, wishing to uncover X's secrets alongside the narrator." —Sara Nović, author of True Biz
Library Journal
★ 12/01/2022
In this captivating fictional biography by Lacey (Pew), an NYPL Young Lion/Granta Best of Young American Novelists honoree, the narrator tells us that "people try to escape their past through characters." The character here is a female artist/songwriter/novelist/performer, known as X, who possessively hides her childhood history. She was also the wife of narrator Charlotte Marie (C.M.) Lucca, who is now mourning her death. In a narrative framed as alternative history, C.M. begins discovering surprising secrets about her spouse, starting with X's having come from the Southern Territories, which broke away from the United States on Thanksgiving Day, 1945. Among other deviations from history following this "Great Disunion," activist Emma Goldman starts a political party in 1946, Jackson Pollock and other nonobjective painters are killed in an act of terrorism, and there is a dramatic reversal of gender norms in the art world, with women creating the majority of artworks. With little artistic expression allowed in the Southern Territories, where citizens can be incarcerated for the slightest reason, X escapes this tyranny for New York City. There, she transforms herself many times over as she continually creates art and music with many famous people. VERDICT A tour-de-force in literary and artistic realms, this engrossing story of breakaway artist X will challenge readers on many levels.—Lisa Rohrbaugh
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-01-12
A widow sets out to uncover the truth about her late wife, a mercurial artist who adopted many personas, in this audacious intellectual history of an alternate America.
C.M. Lucca is a former crime reporter who resents the inaccuracies printed in the only biography of her wife, X, a famous performance artist who has recently died. Determined to correct the record, C.M. begins reporting on her wife's mysterious origins and career as a shape-shifting provocateur. "When she died, all I knew about X's distant past was that she'd arrived in New York in 1972. She never told me her birthdate or birthplace, and she never adequately explained why these things were kept secret," C.M. explains. Was X really born in the Southern Territory, a theocratic dictatorship separated from the Northern Territory for 50 years by a wall? If so, how did she escape? And how did her childhood shape the artist she was to become? C.M.'s reporting trips put her face to face with former spouses, lovers, revolutionaries, terrorists, friends, and hangers-on, but a clear picture of X remains elusive. Instead, Lacey creates a portrait of a biographer haunted by grief, struggling to untangle love from abjection, fiction from reality, art from life. "At first I had rules for researching X's life and I followed them...I have broken every rule I ever set for myself," C.M. mourns midway through the biography. "And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life." Throughout C.M.'s manuscript, Lacey includes footnotes and citations from imagined articles by real contemporary writers whose names readers well versed in cultural criticism will recognize. The effect is pleasurable and disorienting, like reading a book in a dream or surfacing a memory that's gone fuzzy around the edges. As C.M. circles closer to the truth about X, her memories about X's violent tendencies become clearer and sharper. "I did not know her, and I do not know who she was," C.M. admits at last. "I do not know anything of that woman, though I did love her—on that point I refuse to concede—and it was a maddening love and it was a ruthless love and it refuses to be contained."
Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph.
