Thanks to Granta via Netgalley for the ARC - and it would be nice if the references to books could be changed to UK editions of books where they exist (e.g I noted two published by Les Fugitives that are attributed to the later US publisher)

Review:

"The last sentence is from Montaigne, though she gives him no credit."

Biography of X is the third novel from the always-interesting Catherine Lacey, author previously of the brilliant debut Nobody is Ever Missing and the fascinating, if flawed Pew. Ultimately I found this less successful - more later - but it is certainly intriguing if not always entirely engrossing.

Biography of X largely consists of a book within a book, a biography of the enigmatic artist X, famed for her multiple identities (performance art in themselves), reinvention of her art into different genres, and unknown origins, written after her death by her bereaved wife, the journalist, C.M. Lucca. (both fictional of course)

Lacey's addition to C.M. Lucca's biography constitutes two 'real-life' lists of sources

- a revised list of photographic sources, some of which are, in Sebaldian fashion, photos Lacey has found, other from Wikipedia Commons, and some made by Lacey or commissioned by her; and

- sources for many of the quotes in the book (some of which have fictional sources in footnotes in Lucca's book, others simply phrases in the text).

The second of these is at the heart of the novel, as X, her own words but also those said by others about her, is a conscious (on Lacey's behalf) assemblage of many other female artists, writers and critics. A scan through the sources gives us, inter alia, Reneta Alder, Lynne Tillman, Clarice Lispector, Jean Stein, Kathy Acker, Susna Sontag, Maya Jaggi, Nathalie Leger, Amanda DeMarco, Jean Rhys, Susan Howe, Chris Kraus, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Connie Converse, Parul Seghal, Fleur Jaeggy, Merve Emre, Barbara Demick, Sophie Calle, Audrey Tatou, Marguerite Younecar, Louise Bourgeois and many many more. The book also features, as characters, male artists such as Tom Waits, David Bowie and Denis Johnson, X's career taking a nose-dive when she quotes political views using Bowie's real-life words (in the novel the more liberal Bowie disowns her views).

And this is an example of the confusion (or innovation) of the approach, some of the artists appear as characters in their own-right in the novel - Connie Conserve with a different life story, plays a major role as a lover of X - some are used to blend into X's own biography and sometimes artist A is quoted as using artist B's words to describe X:

"In X’s archive, I could find only one note from Connie, an inscription in a Thomas Bernhard novel: “We are a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives.”"

This inscription from Connie Conserve to X is actually from Vivian Gornick.

And as another, early, example we get the following:

"I rarely agreed with the way that other people described my wife, except for the quote from Lynne Tillman that was included in one of the obituaries. She’d said X was “voracious for people . . . one of the great devourers of all time. But her method of devouring was to entice. If you had a room full of twenty people and X came in, there was an energy uplift. It got everybody off their boring number. Here was this glamorous freak.”"

The quote described as being from the real-life Lynne Tillman about X is actual a quote by Chuck Wein as told to Jean Stein.

Or this:

"Nathalie Léger once described X’s names in an essay: “Who knows if it was in order better to conceal her self or to expose her self, if it was in order to escape her self or to understand her self; five names, according to some, though I only know of three. With a name nothing is ever clear, on the contrary, everything becomes more opaque.” Léger was one of the few past acquaintances I contacted who seemed to have a wholly uncomplicated relationship with X. “To me it seemed like a reasonable solution to a person, being a self,” Léger told me over the phone. “You have to get through—how to put it?—shame, essentially, yes that’s it—the shame and boredom of talking about yourself.” She later added, “Shifting between so many names, between selves—it must have relieved some of that shame.”"

The first quote (“Who knows...opaque.”) is by Léger, as translated by Natasha Lehrer, as published in her The White Dress about the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca (a book which itself draws on many other female performance artists). The White Dress is published by Les Fugitives in the UK (another of the publisher's novels, Now, Now, Louison) is used indirectly taking an anecdote about Louise Bourgeois and making it an incident in X's life.

The first part of the second quote (“You have...yourself.”) is also by Léger, but from an interview with, and translated by, Amanda DeMarco in Bomb Magazine and talking about herself, with the second part (“Shifting...shame.”) of Lacey's own invention.

Lacey's own appendix is clear as to all the sources - this is not my sleuthing work - and there is a partial reading list of more general sources here - but it's a rather odd approach e.g. it's not clear if the artists involved have been approached. My guess is not - it did seem Lacey was careful to mostly use the deceased as the main characters.

The novel is also set in an alternative America, one that was partioned (North and South Korea is obviously a model, with Barbara Demick's work is drawn on) post WW2 into a religiously-conservative South, a socialist North (activist Emma Goldman becomes the first leader) and a West that rather stays out of the ideological battles. This creates an interesting backdrop, and in particular proves the key to X's life story, and enables Lacey to have some fun (Rachel Cusk's words about female artists in a male-dominated society are used in the novel by a frustrated male artist 'Richard Cusk') but seems something of a sideshow which would perhaps have merited a separate novel in its own right.

And that ultimately gets us to the novel's biggest flaw - it is simply far too long, and the life of a fictional artist (punctuated by the need to check the appendix for who actually said what, or what this photograph really shows) couldn't sustain my interest for its near 400 pages.

So a reluctant 3 stars - but Lacey is an author I'll continue to follow - I'd rather flawed and fascinating than conventional.

*3.5 stars, rounded up.

I apologise in advance for what is likely going to be a confusing review, because there are a lot of mixed feelings here!

“Biography of X” by Catherine Lacey ended up being one of those books that I loved the concept of much more than I did the actual experience. It’s a unique and intriguing mix of novel, autofiction, biography, speculative fiction and mystery set in an alternate U.S., and the way this book blends genre is simply a joy to experience, especially at the book’s engrossing start.

We follow C.M. Lucca, the widow of an erratic, confounding but brilliant artist called X, as Lucca tries to piece together the story of X’s life after her sudden death. This leads her into an exploration of everything from politics and religious fanaticism to art, gender, truth and fiction. I thought it was a stunning premise. Sadly though, I quickly wished Lacey had spent more time delving deeper into the context of X’s story – like this horrific version of America physically divided by religion, race, class and political creed – rather than into X’s somewhat one-dimensional, ultimately repugnant character. I kept feeling like this book was telling me exactly what to think, and exactly how to interpret it. I wanted to work harder to find those answers, and I found it consistently difficult to care about X or the ideas she very clearly stood as a metaphor for.

The flow began to stall for me about halfway through this novel, and by the end I felt like a truly brilliant idea had been stunted by its characters and a somewhat flat relationship with the reader. But I genuinely love what comes out of Catherine Lacey’s mind (I adored her last novel, Pew) and I would still pick up anything she writes. And do I recommend you pick up Biography of X and experience her artful genre-bending? Absolutely yes.

I really struggled to give this a star rating, so I’ve landed on 3.5 ⭐️! I’d like to thank Granta and NetGalley very much for the ARC.

A fascinating concept with intriguing subject content, but a structure that I personally struggled to get my head round. Can see this being a big success in the hands of the right people though

An ambitious combination of Margaret Atwood dystopia and Daniel James metafictional examination of artistic identity, with some traces of Hanya Yanagihara; one which is perhaps more impressive than enjoyable to read.

This is a biography within a novel as the 2022 novel by Catherine Lacey (author of the hauntingly enigmatic “Pew”) is, effectively a title page and an extensive 20 page set of notes/attributions (more later) wrapped around a fictionalised 360 page 2005 publication : “The Biography of X” by CM Lucca.

CM Lucca was the (she eventually discovers) third wife of someone known only as X, an enigmatic, egocentric, rich, famous but elusive writer and artist, as well as performance artist and whose performance art extended to living multiple extended identities over time.

She had always resisted biographical capture and so when after her death her frustrated putative biographer – Theodore Smith - succeeds in publishing (to acclaim) an account of X’s life despite CM Lucca’s resistance; CM decides to at least publish some information that she can use to discredit Smith’s account. But what begins as an attempt to trace X’s origins (about which she has been very silent) and to use the limited archive information that X left behind develops over the course of what we read into a “corrective biography”.

CM first big discovery is that X was born in the Southern Territory

In rather clunkily justified exposition section, it is explained that (in the world of the biography) the Southern Territory is a right wing theocracy that took advantage of the distraction of the rest of the country on World War II to split from the Northern and Western parts of America on Thanksgiving Day 1945 in a long secretly planned Christian-Coup, erecting a wall from the North (which had gradually evolved into effectively a Nordic style largely-atheist social-democracy) and founding a totalitarian state which relied heavily on mass incarceration, a Stasi-style informer network and coercive exploitation of religious faith, before finally breaking down in 1996 after the North reinvaded a by then almost collapsed society.

A large part of the initial part of the biography is as much an exploration of life in the Southern Territory before and after reunification including X’s involvement in an infamous attack on a rifle factory.

CM then moves onto X’s undercover escape to the North (all discovered escapees were immediately returned). She starts with an overview of the years 1971 to 1981 when she adapted a series of different personas/identities within and around the art world (and interacting with a series of our world artists) before effectively in 1982 producing a seminal work “The Human Subject” which claimed that entire decade into as a piece of performance art


After discussing this exhibition CM says "At first I had rules for researching X’s life and I followed them. A first rule was that I would read only the part of the archive that X had left “in order,” nothing else. A second rule was that once I discovered her birthplace, I had to stop. A third rule was that if I was unable to follow the second rule, then I could only research the years before the work on a Human Subject began in 1971. A fourth was that I was to write only one essay dispelling Theodore Smith’s many errors, and that was it. I have broken every rule I ever set for myself."

And the remainder of the biography is the result of those broken rules as CM meets a wide range of people who knew X (or X under some other identity), explores her collaboration with artists such as David Bowie, Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, Tom Waits, comes to a greater realisation (often uncomfortably so) of her own relationship with X while understanding the stories X told about herself as well as those that others chose to believe about her (including CM herself).

One of the most impressive aspects of the novel is the way in which Lacey weaves into the fictional CM text a whole series of real life quotes and references: as is set out in the twenty or so pages of notes/sources which complete Lacey’s novel (note that these are different and distinct from the extensive foot notes in CM’s fictional biography).

There is also an interesting but perhaps slightly undeveloped side story about the development of art in this (fictional world) – where a Painters Massacre in 1943 lead to a Southern mob killing a group of male artists such as Pollock, Duchamp and Kandinsky which combined with the rise of “radical feminist and anarchist ideas” lead to the “belief that the feminine perspective was the only necessary perspective was becoming commonplace at the time; male artists pursued careers with the burden of explaining or accounting for the global history of male violence and destruction; that is—men could only make work about being men. Few took on the task, and those who did were often ridiculed.” An economic collapse in the art world after America’s dissolution further led to a male-exit from art (as it was not a viable “bread-winner” role) which then meant that when European money flooded back into American art in the 1970s the resulting wealth fell almost entirely to female artists like X.

All of this is very well done but I was not really sure it was a book I particularly enjoyed. I really have little to no interest in reading the biography of an artist so a fictional one is of limited interest also. - particularly when the subject is as self-centered, manipulative and generally dislikable as X appeared to be to me (I was reminded of having to spend so many pages hearing about Jude from “A Little Life”).

In the way in which X is linked to so many seminal real-life works and artists I was inevitably reminded of Daniel James “The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas” and in fact very many of the same iconic artistic figures appear in both books. But the book lacks James’s commitment to his fictionalised biography – both immediately (where are the Twitter accounts or fake websites?) and I am almost sure, in the long run. I remain to be proved wrong on that – but only will be if Lacey produces in a few years a book which features some of the leading Goodreads reviewers of this book and even attributes fictional publications to them.

Or perhaps another way of saying this is that for a fake biography of an artist with a complete dedication to her deceptions as a form of performance artistry, the book itself lacks that wider dedication to performance art.

Catherine Lacey’s ‘Biography of X’ is the story of a fictional, controversial artist known only as ‘X’, structured as a novel written by her widow, the fictional journalist C.M Lucca. Lucca seeks to learn more about her wife’s life, re-examining the events they lived through together, the stories she knows, and the enormous gaps in her knowledge. Through this project, Lucca will come to question the nature of the relationship that she and her wife had, and how much truth there is in the things she thought she knew.

Early on in the novel, it is established that this is an alternate history - the world of the novel is not our world. In this history, the United States are very much not United, divided into Northern and Southern territories and ruled by two very distinct governments; the Vietnam war is referenced as a potential conflict that thankfully never materialised; and, less dramatically, musician and producer Brian Eno is, in this world, Brianna Eno. Lacey’s world building is intricate and impressive, weaving real-world and fictional events to create a believable history. In this sense it is reminiscent of last year’s Booker Prize longlisted ‘Case Study’, in which the lines between truth and fiction are intentionally blurred. While this mostly works, and is generally effective, it sometimes feels a little unnatural - the in-world author tells us things that an in-world audience would surely know, which slightly breaks the immersion. This is explained away by noting that the government have tried to cover up the truth, but this explanation fails to be totally convincing. Nitpicking aside, this is a clever device and Lacey pulls it off well.

With this in place, the central premise of ‘who is X?’ can be explored - and I had more issues with this aspect of the novel. While the fictional X certainly lived a noteworthy and eventful life, the storytelling never becomes completely engaging or interesting, and I’m not convinced I’d have read a biography of X had she been a real person. Told through various interviews conducted by X’s widow, we learn about X from the people she interacted with throughout her life, and the various names and personas she created for herself. We learn about X’s history as a novelist, publisher, music producer and performance artist, though the stories start to feel all too similar and slightly bland. The series of stories about X’s life in the art world never really seems to go anywhere - Lacey is clearly interested in examining the limits of art and what can be counted as art, but the repetitive stories mean the book drags and it doesn’t provide much in the way of interesting insight, and the central mystery fails to be particularly compelling.

Thanks to Granta and Netgalley for the e-ARC!

This is 80% brilliance, 20% frustration. I love the premise (a surviving partner uncovering details of their lost one's life), which is not original but compelling, and the context (a life lived in the aftermath of a failed Gilead-like state), which is given new life in this kind of story. I loved how closely Lacey blends reality with her fiction, referencing real people and real works that X was involved with (so many footnotes!). And I really enjoyed the style, which was sometimes a pitch-perfect rendition of an artist's biography, and sometimes a spy thriller, and sometimes domestic noir. The writing is confident and consistent.

That said, I wish the novel had been shorter. It could have done what it does in many fewer pages, and if it is to be this length, it needs a little more meat - after a while it began to feel repetitive for the sake of it (here's another person who knew X under a different name, and the shenanigans that occurred during this period). It is in some ways a long meditation on art and 'genius' via the medium of a disillusioned wife, which is at times compelling, and at times, just a tiny bit boring.

THAT said: I'll be heading for Lacey's back catalogue immediately, based on the clever style and format alone.

My thanks to Granta and NetGalley for the ARC.

This is an incredibly ambitious novel that you often forget is a work of fiction. X is... many things; a writer, performer, artist, music producer, socialite and when she dies suddenly her wife is left with the question of who she really was. She decides to research X by reading her journals & interviewing the people that appear in them.

We are introduced to an alternate version of the US, one where the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy, ceded in 1945 and now reunification process is underway. I think we're used to this sort of narrative being the whole plot in books and it definitely served as an accessory here & honestly I didn't have a problem with that. That's not what I cam to this book for! It was interesting and provided necessary context.

The way fact & fiction is blended in this book is masterful, it really lends a richness that leads you to believe that X really was a woman who existed. A pitiful, strong, loathsome, creative one at that.

I think my biggest criticism is the length, it really feels even longer than its 416 pages & I imagine that's because the pace switches from slow to fast at a moments notice.

Overall I very much enjoyed it and imagine it will grow on me even further the more it settles in my mind.

I have to admire the craft and commitment that's gone into this book but I wish Lacey had made me work harder. The text lays out its premise in the opening pages and doesn't really deviate from this programme:

"And might I - despite how much I had deified and worshipped X, and believed her to be pure genius - might I now accept the truth of her terrible, raw anger and boundless cruelty? It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived with her."

The use of that 'deified and worshipped' links the central relationship to the alternative history of the US which is set as background and where America is divided by a wall in 1945 and the Southern Territory becomes a 'fascist theocracy' (an allusion to [book:The Handmaid’s Tale|38447]?). The ideological struggle depends, as always, on storytelling and narrativisation, and X's brutality draws a dotted line to the mass incarcerations and executions that take place (this is all off-stage and background only to the main story, and only emerges as the narrator investigates X's unknown life).

In the foreground is a not unfamiliar story of a wild-child genius who expresses herself through a vast array of performative characters, identities and media. She changes her name, travels extensively, is artist, novelist, song-writer (with David Bowie, natch, another shape-shifter) - who gives controversial interviews and can never be pinned down. All this is almost a postmodern manifesto and the text itself draws attention to the way it collapses 'fiction' and 'reality' as real people are slickly interwoven (Lynn Tillman, Kathy Acker, Bowie as noted) and intersect with X.

Lacey supports the book's ideological infrastructure with a vast array of footnotes, sources and references which made me think of [author:Jorge Luis Borges|500] where the more sources and evidence are provided, the further fictional 'reality' recedes for artificiality.

This is all huge fun as the narrative makes parallels between art, politics, activism and exploitation. It's perhaps a bit long for what it has to say but succeeds in bestowing upon itself exactly the kind of slippery identity that it is contemplating.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey is about grief and art and how well you can know or not know a person.

Biography of X is an epic novel, simultaneously a fictional biography and not one, an alternative history, and a story of a celebrity artist and writer with many guises, feuds, and collaborations. X is dead and her wife CM, angry at an incorrect biography of her, starts trying to unravel the mysteries and history of X, a woman who may have been born in the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that came out of a rift in the US and now reunified. As CM charts X's various identities, adventures, and encounters, it is clear that X was complex, but CM may be heading towards what she doesn't want to think about: the truth about their relationship.

This feels like a unique book, something which takes elements that feel familiar—the fake citations for interviews, the tone of both biography and not, creating an alternate American history—but combines them in a way that is ambitious and surprising. Perhaps the most notable macro element for me was the way in which the book tells an alternate history not only of America, with divided Territories and changed politics, but also of art and culture, changing art history into something female-led and adding X into male creators' works. In many ways, this seems only incidental to the central concept of the novel, the attempt by the narrator to write something that is not a biography, but is about her dead wife and her metaphorically shapeshifting past. However, in actuality, both these elements are deeply related as the book plays out a multi-faceted look at storytelling and constructing stories, both as an everyday activity and when actually writing.

At times the sheer amount of content and detail dragged, and at other times it felt exciting, though perhaps no point more so than when I got to the references section at the end, in which Lacey acknowledges all the changes made to real life quotes and incidents to make the book. The levels of playing with storytelling were fascinating and it was that element I liked most. There's also a lot in the book about the nature of art, and the way that CM seems to focus on presenting herself as the antithesis to art, not understanding X's work at times and focusing on how she herself is plain and a journalist focused on apparent facts, even when people tell her there are none.

Audacious, exciting, sometimes slow and sometimes fast, with ridiculous characters and an alternative history that verges on completely satirical, Biography of X is an experience. The concept of truth is complicated so much that you reach the end unsure if it's even true that you just read a book, and that was fascinating.

At a certain point in Biography of X, one of the eponymous X's novels is described as "a novel that emulsified fact and fiction"--the same can be said of Biography of X. It's a slippery novel in the way that it straddles fact and fiction, deeply commits itself to both the "real" and the constructed. That it is billed to us as a biography, and not a novel, immediately speaks to the kind of standards that it is attaching to itself, and that it in turn attempts to live up to. As a work of nonfiction ostensibly written by C. M. Lucca, X's widow, Biography of X commits to the research that such a work entails: at the end of each of its chapters, the reader is presented with a list of sources that include--sometimes fictional, sometimes real, sometimes a bit of both--novels, articles, recordings, interviews, movies, archival materials, all listed along with their authors, dates, publishers, locations. That the novel does this seems to imply a kind of rigorous commitment to the work on the part of C. M. Lucca: this feeling that she is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to the integrity of this biography of her wife that she's trying to write. And yet, in many ways, Lucca is not a very good biographer, or not really a "biographer" at all: she is too close to her subject, her stake in this work too personal. Lucca's biography, then, like Lacey's novel, both is and is not a biography: it is the account of the life of a deceased artist, and it is the account of the grief of the widow that artist left behind; it is rigorous enough to attempt to commit to the standards of its genre, and personal enough to cast doubt on its supposed adherence to those standards. In other words, it "emulsifies fact and fiction," mixes the factual details of X's life, supported by meticulous references, with the narrative that Lucca, as someone who loved X, wants to believe about X, or used to believe about X, or is trying to uncover from X.

So far, I've talked about C. M. Lucca, the fictional author in this book, more than I have about Catherine Lacey, the actual author of the book. But Biography of X, the novel, and the biography of X, the biography, are not so easy to separate. Like a mobius strip, they feed into each other, the one looping into the other such that it becomes impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Put another way, Biography of X is a deeply metafictional novel in the way that it is constantly metabolizing itself, at once calling attention to and calling into question its own narrative, its author and her subject, its methodology.

One of the things I loved most about this novel is the way that it slowly unravelled--and, by extension, complicated--the relationship between Lucca and X. The novel, we are told, is the story of a widow who, in the wake of her grief, decides to write a biography about her deceased wife, who was quite a famous and prolific artist. It's the kind of premise that almost immediately implies a certain kind of story, one which boils down to: grieving widow finds out who her wife "really was." But the novel is not really interested in anything as facile as that; it's not interested in who X "really was" so much as it is interested in who X is made out to be, especially by Lucca. What it asks is, how do we construct accounts for people--and for ourselves--when they seem to elide being accountable in the first place? (In that respect, this novel really reminded me of Trust by Hernan Diaz and the way it also delves into the many accounts of an almost larger-than-life person.) X is undoubtedly a complex and elusive figure--becoming less rather than more understandable as the novel goes on (and I mean that in the best way)--but for me the more compelling figure in this novel is easily Lucca, X's ostensible biographer. As much as it is presented as a biography of X, I found Biography of X to be such a sensitive and moving portrait of Lucca: of what it is like to be so deeply (and dangerously) caught up in a romantic relationship, to so intimately and vulnerably tie your sense of self to another person. For all its deft thematic explorations, Biography of X is also just about this grief that has overtaken its narrator, this persistent sense of loss that she cannot shake off, and that she is unable to resolve.

(One final note: Catherine Lacey's writing in this novel is just stunning. I have pages and pages of highlights; when it came to looking for some quotes to put in this review, there was an absolute embarrassment of riches for me to choose from.)

Biography of X is such a fascinating, engrossing, impressive novel, complex and challenging and, critically, resistant to any kind of simple answers--in other words, just the kind of love that I love, and that I did love, a lot.

Thank you to Granta for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!