ARTS & CULTURE BOOKS Unraveling X

Catherine Lacey asks whether we can ever truly know another person in Biography of X.

By DMITRY SAMAROV

What if you fall in love with a monster who engulfs your entire world then dies? You’re bound to have questions, and, if you’re a writer, or just a certain type of obsessive, you’ll turn over every rock and upset every applecart looking for answers.

In Catherine Lacey’s immersive new novel, Biography of X, a journalist named CM Lucca goes on a quest that lasts nearly a decade and spans continents to discover the secrets within secrets her wife—last named X—left unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. It’s a book about the art world, American politics, alternate identities, and the unknowability of any one human by any other, told in the form of an epic investigation.

When CM (for Charlotte or maybe Cynthia, names are ever changeable) finds X dead in the office of their remote upstate New York cabin, the latter is at the pinnacle of a career as an artist/writer/musician. The subject of museum retrospectives, winner of awards, and target of envious colleagues and obsessed stalkers, X is a legendary genius committed to taking her true identity to the grave. When a sycophantic young writer named Theodore Smith contacts CM hoping to interview her about X for his forthcoming biography of the artist, CM refuses—as X instructed her during her lifetime—but when the book comes out, full of errors, according to CM’s view, she begins her own winding quest for answers. Set in an alternate 20th century that has splintered the U.S. into Northern, Southern, and Western Territories after the Great Disunion of 1945, many known political and cultural figures play crucial but altered roles. The anarchist Emma Goldman, for instance, is an influential longtime senator from Illinois; Bernie Sanders is a multiterm president; and the art world is dominated by women as a corrective to male domination in prior centuries. It’s a world a lot like ours with a few important poetic changes, made to suit a 21st-century writer’s point of view. How resonant or familiar these changes come o will depend on each reader’s worldview and experience.

A megalomaniacal shape-shifter, X cycles through names and personas the way an average person rifles through the closet. Before CM goes on her journey, she is aware of a few of these alter egos but is repeatedly shocked as each revelation yields only more splintering, echoing layers. Allowed, under heavy guard, to visit the recently reintegrated Southern Territory, which had been under extreme theocratic rule until its vanquishing by the North, CM meets X’s birth family and begins to build a timeline based on facts rather than mythology or obfuscation. The trouble is that the more she learns, the less she recognizes the consuming love of her life.

I was reminded of Bruce Wagner’s recent fi ctive oral history, Roar: American Master , while reading Lacey’s book. Both use nonfiction forms and incorporate historic figures and events to fashion a portrait of a great but maddening artist. But whereas Wagner revels and delights in his golem’s exploits, Lacey is cool and judgmental. No matter how brilliant X is creatively or how captivating she is romantically, she is a monster to be cut down to size, a balloon to be burst. X is a serial hoaxer, but is there anyone there once all the masks come o ? The art world is a vapid place full of schemers, climbers, and hangers-on, but I wondered at times whether Lacey thinks the whole idea of art (or writing) is a kind of scam.

Though based in an imagined New York— apparently the center of the art world even in a fictive universe—there are frequent references to Chicago, where Lacey lived for years until 2021. (She has X claiming to have bartended at the Rainbo Club on a job application.) Being a biography, her book is rich with footnotes and citations—most invented—to real-life friends like musicians Tim Kinsella and Jenny Pulse as well as admired writers like Lucy Sante. A celebrated writer herself, Lacey generously populates her novel with fellow luminaries. By playing fast and loose with time, identity, and facts, Lacey fashions a universe in which creative people are much more important and influential than they are in ours. But in the end, I was left to wonder what the point of all this grafting, embroidering, and shifting of historical material amounts to. X is the love of CM’s life but also the beacon around which dozens of other satellites orbit. Is Lacey saying we’re all doomed to be lesser lights for those who consume and enthrall us? Does making art lead inevitably to destruction and desolation? CM demands a meeting with the coroner, expecting X’s cause of death to be murder or suicide, but the man insists her heart just gave out. It’s not a poetic conclusion but a very true-to-life one. Perhaps all that shape-shifting finally exhausted that inscrutable creature. v