Book Review: Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Beginning with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and continuing with so-called New Journalism during the late Sixties, people tossed around the term Non-Fiction Novel when referring to book-length reportage written in modestly ambitious prose. Beginning with Catherine Lacey’s audacious novel Biography of X, published in 2023, we need to invent a new label, along the lines of Fictional Non-Fiction. Right now, however, Biography of X occupies its own corner of the universe. The only precursors that come to mind are Nabokov’s Pale Fire or possibly a few Borges short stories.
Reviews of her third novel have suggested, or implied, that Catherine Lacey flirts with DTM (doing too much) in Biography of X. Book within a book meta-narrative: check. Counterfactual or alternate history of the 20th Century: check. Potentially confusing pseudonyms and multiple identities: check. Guest appearances by real-life figures: check. Citations of wholly invented, anachronistic articles by contemporary journalists: check.
Somehow it reads much smoother than it sounds. This mock-biographical structure permits Lacey’s narrator — her pseudonym is C.M. Lucca — to slowly reveal the truth about her late wife “X” and their seven-year relationship. You bet it’s complicated.
Readers who require “relatable” or “likable” characters in novels should steer well clear of Biography of X. But the eponymous enigma X isn’t repellant, not to me anyway, and her erstwhile biographer’s voice, C.M. Lucca or Catherine Lacey’s voice, pulled me in straight away.
At various times during her half-century on a planet resembling ours, X is known as Caroline Walker, Clyde Hill, Dorothy Eagle, Bee Converse, Vera, Martina Riggio and Yarrow Hall. She becomes mildly famous, or infamous, for her (overlapping) creative work as an author, visual artist, conceptual performer, record producer, and indie press publisher. Sorry I forget precisely which name pairs with each job description. X is a human mashup of Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Susan Sontag, Patti Smith, and more obscure figures such as the cult author Kathy Acker.
Unlike Acker, who produced relentlessly experimental and oft-impenetrable texts, Catherine Lacey employs approachable prose to describe difficult, purposefully unapproachable characters. Still X’s fictional connection to Kathy Acker, and the downtown Manhattan demimonde she helped define during the waning decades of the last century, is crucial to understanding her Biography.
X and and her widow C.M. Lucca live in a dystopian alternative United States though readers should be forgiven if they don’t realize that at first. Gradually we learn that the country has experienced The Great Disunion of 1945 aka The Christian Coup. This cataclysm coincides with the birth of X, who died in 1996.
In Lacey’s counter-factual, Northern states became a woman-dominated liberal stronghold while the Southern zone stood tall as a backward region of fundamentalist belief, systematic racism and institutional sexism. The West, fleetingly mentioned, was vaguely Libertarian and geographically isolated. If this sounds too familiar, or “on the nose” in current parlance, then the truly subversive element of this alt-history creeps up behind you. Despite all these radical changes in society and politics, popular culture and the arts, especially the more adventurous pursuits, have evolved pretty much the same as in the real world, i.e. our world. David Bowie and Tom Waits, two of the recognizable names that X collaborates with, make the same music and emit the same personas that they did in our own weird sphere. Catherine Lacey dares to suggest that art and music and writing are actually independent, functioning outside, or alongside, the larger world.
Near the end of her life, X is contacted by a biographer seeking her cooperation, which she unsurprisingly fails to grant. When Theodore Smith’s unauthorized A Woman Without A History appears after X’s passing, her widow, incensed, embarks on her own research. Biography of X is the result.
“What bothers me about it [Smith’s book] is that his lies have been held up as the definitive account of X’s life, that his work speaks the final word about her groundbreaking, multihyphenate career and its impact, that every reader and critic seems to believe that Mr. Smith successfully navigated the labyrinth of secrets X kept around herself, and that he illuminated some true core of her life. This is far from the case.”
C.M. Lucca works through her grief by unearthing the layers and levels of her late wife’s life — or lives. Along the way she learns a lot, maybe too much, about X, their relationship, and herself. By the end both narrator and readers begin to realize that entering into a marriage with X resembled enlisting in a cult. Lucca relinquished control of her life, and her mind. Writing X’s biography represents her only hope of reclamation.
“What was there to say I had no life to risk anymore. She had my life. I didn’t know how she had or what she was doing with it, but that’s what it felt like — she had my life and I had a home.”
C.M. Lucca ends her biographical quest with no easy answers or pat closure. She’s left alone with the inevitable grind, the unending daily labor of long-term mourning, and the eventual acceptance of loss. Reviewing Biography of X in Bustle, Erin Somers writes:
“Does the famous wife wrong, abuse, and otherwise trammel the unfamous wife? She does. But the trammeled wife regains some agency in the end by writing the famous wife’s definitive biography, thereby reclaiming the journalism career she forfeited in service of her marriage, and reckoning with her own trammeling. No well-intentioned future writer will have to re-draw her from a fragment; the wife has already written the story of her own fragmentation.”
Ultimately we’re stuck with our own identities, our own stories, even or especially when they’re entwined in someone else’s grand inventions. Unravelling that mix of fiction and fact leads to something like the truth.
