Catherine Lacey’s ‘Biography of X’

by Tim Pfaff

C atherine Lacey’s new (and fourth) novel, “Biography of X” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) tries to be all things – and succeeds. This being 2023, it’s being praised for its genrebending when it would be closer to the truth to see it as a keenly intelligent woman’s riding the range with the skill and flair of a circus performer with a foot on each of two horses. Somehow entertainment seems too small a word.

The conceit is this: a writer (of course), horrified by an unauthor- ized (also lousy) biography of her late wife, makes it her personal quest less to find facts to correct the record than to find out who her partner really was. Along the way she finds out that her wife/lover, a performance artist onstage as well as in life, was even more of an act than she previously thought. Discovering at least a baker’s dozen of names under which her spouse lived and worked, the widow settles on X.

Lacey’s skill at keeping multiple plates, heaped high with tempting edibles, spinning in the air – yet another circus act – makes her cap- tivating novel equal parts wildly entertaining, thought-provoking, and emotionally sobering.

Our narrator, C.M.Lucca, is a journalist, a fraught calling in our perilous times, to be sure. She works in the last decade of last-century America, the fractured land now wrestling with Reunification after the 1945 secession of states that carved the nation into The Southern Territory (ST), the Northern Territory, and the Western Territory. Any resemblance to today’s USA, or yesterday’s or tomorrow’s, is strictly intended. I found the hints of a possible re-secession of the ST lip-smacking.

A year after X’s death, and in the immediate wake of Theodore Smith’s acclaimed biography of X, “The Woman with a History,” Lucca strikes out, ostensibly to correct the historical record, but, increasingly, on a quest not unlike Orpheus following Euridice into the underworld, to learn who her mysterious spouse really was.

Lucca’s quest takes her through a rogue’s gallery of the people who knew, worked with, and otherwise survived X, each of whom gets a named chapter. It’s as old a narrative frame as literature has to offer, and Lacey ups the ante on the shortcoming of even the most conscientious historiography by footnoting, preposterously, her sources, all those citations at odds with the reallife referents Lacey catalogs at the end of the “Biography.”

Cast of characters

The cast of characters makes Chaucer’s tale-tellers on their way to Canterbury seem like a company of dullards. For the most part, it’s X’s colleagues from the world of the rebellious arts who stand large in her history, but the reader is unlikely to fob off the accounts of X’s fortifying art as a sex worker in Times Square’s Fun City.

What creeps up on the reader as stealthily as it does on Lucca is that her stage cavorting. She won two Tony awards out of ten nominations, plus a lifetime achievement Tony. She received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2002 and was presented with a Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2009.

She did experience racism and ethnic taunts throughout her life, but unlike rival Rita Moreno (to Rivera’s consternation, fans would often confuse the two actresses because their names were similar-sounding) who expressed anger, she fought back with her talent, not endangering her chances to be considered for a wider range of roles.

“If I was going to lose some parts because directors or agents thought my name sounded too south of the border, that was their problem,” she writes.

Rivera worked her hips off to make sure everyone knew and respected her name, superseding any discrimination. She also believed there was less stereotyping in the theater than in Hollywood.

Early in her career she followed the advice given by one of her idols, Gwen Verdon: “You don’t need to understudy anybody. Be more confident. Go out and create your own roles. Forge your own path.”

Her memoir is proof Rivera fulfilled that mandate. She says she wrote the book for the next generation of kids, telling them to go on and live their own lives and not be afraid of what life might have in store for them.

Rivera has embodied her own wisdom and readers get to experience not only a consummate legend, but a terrific human being. Chita, take your well-deserved bow!t

‘Chita: A Memoir’ by Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco. HarperOne/ Collins $29.99 (in English, Spanish and audiobook) www.harpercollins.com one of the most artistic things about X was her willingness to feed on others and then, as Joan Didion declared the artist’s true calling, to sell them out.

There’s not a hastily drawn character in the lot, many of whom the readers might even find themselves thinking about when they’re away from the novel. Some even steal the spotlight, however briefly, from X.

But, taking into account why we’re gathered together here, let’s appreciate the principal gay male character. Like Professor Higgins, Oleg Hall, with his “exuberant homosexuality,” is rich and is as much in the market for a sensational protégé as X is for a patron. Besides setting X up in palatial digs of her own, Oleg introduces her to New York society with predictably outrageous results.

Lacey’s humor is the kind that hits you in the ass on the way to the next sentence. Against the odds, her chronicle is devoid of both cliché and groaners. There are few other writers you’d take this outrageous a display from, yet it interests and sustains beyond reason or explanation.

Such as it’s derivative at all, it’s in its tireless name-dropping and resort to visual means to amplify the prose.

Grainy photographs of droopy subjects are right out of the fiction of W.G. Sebald and placed with a narrative precision more characteristic of the traditional novel than the sleight of hand of a graphic novel.

The sheer level of invention is hard to keep up with at times, but it operates like an engine over a ceaselessly compelling 400 pages. At its most ribald, it bleeds the stuff of human comedy. The humor, deeply compassionate in the end, has the same kind of undertow you feel in an opera love duet; no amount of flash can conceal the hazards of desire, the workings of fate, and the tragedy to come.

It would be an insult to the ingenuity of Lacey’s novel to say that it has a moral. Still, many a participant in a romantic relationship will recognize the deep bafflement entailed in trying to know another human being at all.t

Read the full review on www.ebar.com.

‘Biography of X,’ by Catherine Lacey. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 390 pages $28