Recent Reading: Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Angered by an unauthorized, inaccurate biography of her late wife, the multi-disciplinary artist, public intellectual, and provocateur known only as X, journalist C.M. Lucca sets out to correct the record by writing her own biography. Biography of X is a metafictional exercise that is absolutely committed to the bit, complete with second, internal copyright and About the Author pages, copiously documented (invented) sources for all its quotations, and photographic "evidence" of the events and people it describes. As if that were not enough, the novel takes place in an alternate US, where after the second World War the southern states seceded, forming a dictatorial theocracy which lasted for decades. 

This is such a weird and distinctive project, one that touches on so many topics and tropes that I have always been drawn to, that it seemed inevitable that Biography of X would be one of my favorite reads of the year. But to my dismay—and despite the obvious effort Lacey has put into the novel, and the erudition she demonstrates throughout—the result is bland and uninvolving, and some of the choices it makes have left me scratching my head.

As C.M. explains in the biography's foreword, X, who spent her career pretending to be a myriad different people and creating art in each of their guises—a rough-and-tumble, genderqueer bartender in the East Village whose novel inspired Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son; a superstar music producer and songwriter who worked with David Bowie and rescued the career of early folk singer Connie Converse; the publisher of an avant-garde feminist press; two different performance artists who got in a public feud when one of them accused the other of kidnapping and filming her for an art project—never wanted to be explained in a biography. She did not view her personas as performances or lies, and did not feel that there was any need to explain the "real" woman behind them. C.M. is scathing towards the unofficial biography that purports to identify just this real version of the woman (and, along the way, argues that X's marriage to C.M. was a sham). 

If this conjures associations of Pale Fire, and expectations that C.M.'s supposed journalistic detachment will gradually wear away to reveal a burning need to assert her primacy in X's life and work, what Biography of X actually delivers is depressingly dry. C.M. dutifully describes each of X's artistic projects, the relationships she forged with activists and Manhattan bon vivants, the reports on her in venues like Vanity Fair and The Village Voice. But none of it leaps off the page. You never find yourself wishing you could have attended one of X's exhibits (the way I repeatedly did while reading Siri Hustvedt's similar, but infinitely more exciting and successful, The Blazing World) or been on the ground when one of her famous art world feuds took off.

Worst of all, X herself simply isn't that interesting. In theory, she's Lydia Tár on steroids—brilliant, imperious, full of boundless energy, and not-so-secretly monstrous (both C.M. and all of X's previous partners eventually admit that she was violent towards them). But the actual woman never develops much life (the personas are perhaps a little more engaging, but they all feel—presumably deliberately—like stock types rather than real people). Again and again throughout the novel, we're told that figures both real and invented were won over and eventually obsessed with X, seeing her as a major contributor to their work and allowing her to insinuate herself into their lives and become essential to them. And at no point is this ever convincing.

In Lacey's own list of sources, she reveals that many of the quotations attributed to X were taken from real figures like Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, and Emily Dickinson. But the character she stitches together from these real women lacks their vitality—you do not, for example, fall in mingled love and hate with X the way you almost instantly do with Alena Smith's version of Dickinson in the television series of the same name. To an extent, this might be deliberate—the closest thing the novel has to an emotional arc is C.M. moving past her adoration of X and towards skepticism, and eventually disdain. But since C.M. herself never develops much of a personality through this process, the novel's dryness is not alleviated by it. 

And then of course, there's the alternate history, simultaneously the novel's most intriguing and most frustrating choice. As C.M. reveals—and as her unauthorized biographer missed—X was born in the southern territories. In the novel's longest and most interesting chapter, C.M. travels south to learn about X's past, as a teenage wife and mother who became involved with a dissident group and participated in a terrorist attack on a weapons factory, before escaping to the north. Along the way, she explains the split's origins—after Emma Goldman became FDR's chief of staff and began enacting socialist reforms (among them universal healthcare and a recognition of same-sex relationships), a conservative religious backlash erupted in the south, which seceded and founded a repressive theocratic society that is one part Gilead, one part GDR.

If you're thinking that there's something missing here, you'd be right. Though racism exists in the novel's world, white supremacy is not at the foundation of any part of its American society, not even the southern territories. The novel, in fact, is almost entirely silent on the matter of race—while discussing the secession, for example, C.M. does not once mention the Civil War, and the reader is left to wonder whether it occurred in this world's history (though slavery is mentioned at least once). In other words, Lacey has created a world where the driving ideology of American reactionaries isn't white supremacy, but Christian conservatism. Quite literally, in fact: in one of the notes revealing the real sources from which she took her quotations, Lacey notes that she substituted the term "theocratic fascism" for "the segregationist community". 

Even notwithstanding that these two forces have never been particularly easy to disentangle, this is a baffling choice—all the more so when you consider that there are no significant non-white characters in the novel (one major exception is the leader of a civil rights organization who, naturally, found in X a fellow traveler and rhapsodizes to C.M. about the unique understanding she had of his organization's work). I kept waiting for Lacey to reveal her intention with it, but as the novel progressed she seemed to leave it, and the southern territories in general, in the rearview mirror. It ends up feeling less important than other worldbuilding choices, such as the fact that an École Polytechnique-style attack on a gathering of modernist artists—which left male stalwarts of 20th century art such as Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock dead while sparing the women in the room—has resulted in the art world being dominated by women.

Eventually you have to wonder if the whole point of the novel is the name-dropping, the skill with which Lacey has woven together real sources and people into a semi-imaginary whole where Frank O'Hara lived to old age, and Bernie Sanders became president in the 80s. Perhaps if I were more immersed in the world of mid-20th century arts and letters, I would find this act of worldbuilding more delightful in its own right—certainly, many of the book's most effusive reviews treat its moments of recognition and estrangement as one of its key attractions, and many of them were written by people who are part of the same scene. In the absence of that grounding, my reaction to the novel remains one of detachment, maybe even boredom. At the end of Biography of X, it's hard to understand any of its choices of emphasis—none of them seem to have enough life in them, or enough to say, to be worth the effort.