Biography of X - A Novel by Catherine Lacey
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Web ID: 16490933Dystopian novel written as a fictitious biography
This is one of the more strange and bizarre novels I’ve ever read, and I’ve read several. I initially received it as a digital ARC, for which I am grateful to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, author Catherine Lacey, and NetGalley. However, I’d forgotten I’d received it and was so intrigued by its premise that I also wound up purchasing a copy upon its publication. As with many dystopian novels, this book seamlessly blends fact and fiction, frequently referencing actual people and historical events and intertwining them with fictitious characters and circumstances. The novel is brilliantly written and compelling to read but may have been even better had it been just a tad shorter. I found the constant footnote signs and symbols within the text to be distracting, and, unlike another review I read, I wasn’t the least bit interested in reading any of the footnoted material that followed the end of the text. By the time I finished reading the story itself, I found the subsequent 200 pages of notes and references boring. Aside from the few pages discussing certain real life events and characters and describing how they were used or altered for literary effect, the endless pages of single-lined, fictitious “footnotes” was too much for me; I no longer cared. The story is cleverly written as a biography of a woman’s deceased wife, who called herself X. Being a former journalist, of a sort, she initially began researching X’s life to disprove much of an already published and wholly unauthorized biography written by another. Ultimately, however, the further the author delved into her wife’s life, the more she came to realize how little of her wife she knew and how much her wife deceived her. The book spans several decades from the 1960s through the mid 2000s. It takes place in a dystopian form of the United States divided along political and religious lines into three large territories. They’re called, simply enough, The Northern, Southern, and Western Territories. X never disclosed to anyone, including her wife, where she’d been born nor anything of her childhood or family, but through her research the author learns that X was born in and escaped from the Southern Territory. The Southern Territory had seceded from the rest of the country and became a fascist theocracy shortly after the end of World War II. Much like actual East Berlin, Germany, the Southern Territory erected a wall to keep its citizens from leaving and to keep them ignorant. X rebelled against the tyranny and fell in with a group that fought against the system. Upon her eventual escape from the Southern Territory, X invented an entirely new persona for herself. She continued to reinvent herself multiple times. Throughout the remainder of her life, X used many, varied personas, names, and physical disguises to be a different person to a variety of friends and lovers and the whole of society. Under different guises she became a leader in the fields of art, literature, and music, without ever revealing her true self or origins, not even to her wife. When she eventually publicly acknowledged her various personas and deceptions, she turned her admission into the most spectacular and well known artistic achievement of her lifetime, for which she was greatly lauded and admired. After X’s sudden death, her mourning widow seeks and eventually finds the real person behind the facades and doesn’t like her very much. The book creates a lot of food for thought, particularly in today’s political climate, and is an excellent choice for a book club to read and discuss.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Genre-bending, a literary adventure!
Catherine Lacey's latest, BIOGRAPHY OF X, is her fifth novel—set in an alternate late 20th century—dark and moody, an alluring and intriguing book within a book—crossing between fact and fiction, a fascinating literary adventure by X's widow. AUDIOBOOK: Spellbinding! Firstly, you must listen to the audiobook! I am a massive fan of the narrator, Cassandra Campbell, and she was the perfect voice offering an award-winning performance and an engaging listening experience. Now I need to buy the hardcover. When X—an eccentric prominent, elusive artist and writer with a mysterious past who wore many names and faces, falls dead in her office, her widow, C.M. Lucca is devastated and overwhelmed with grief. The widow sets out to uncover the truth about her late wife. CM had given up her life and career, making X the center of her universe, leaving her husband for X, and later marrying. X and CM have lived together in New York throughout their marriage, first in the city and then upstate. After X's death in 1996, C.M. Lucca (wife and biographer) sets out to write a biography of X's life. She soon realizes she does not know the many mysteries of her wife. CM is also a Pulitzer prize–winning crime reporter and digs into the past of the woman who both fascinated and terrified her. She begins in the small Mississippi town where X was born, which X kept a secret to protect her from agents of the Southern Territory. As Lucca conducts interviews over the next several years, she begins to doubt how well she knew X. CM's first discovery is that X is a rare refugee from the South, having escaped during an attempted terrorist attack. Chapter by chapter, Lucca peels back the mystery of X’s multi-jobs and manically productive identities, including Bee Converse (musician), Clyde Hill (author), Martina Riggio (feminist publisher), Cassandra Edwards (author published by Riggio), and Yarrow Hall (filmmaker), among others. CM learns she was her third wife, and X was not always a kind person. She was selfish, manipulative, cruel, deceptive, narcissistic, violent, and abusive. Who was this woman she fell in love with? Did she push away all the bad things? Though X was recognized as a vital creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opened Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. As the chapters recount Lucca's interviews with the people whom X, under different guises, knew, loved, and exploited through the decades, it also describes an alternate version of American history. From the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, an alternate history in which the southern U.S. pulled off a surprise secession in 1945. Through the writing, she tries to make sense of her life, X, and her mysterious life and journey. However, what prompted her to write the biography was a man named Theodore Smith, who published an authorized biography of X, and she thought it was bad and set out to write her own. C.M. is shocked to learn X was born in the Southern Territory, the portion of the U.S. that splintered off after a far-right Christian overthrow. Until the Reunification in 1996, it was almost impossible for any Southern citizen to escape to the Northern or Western Territories, and the few who did were tracked down to be brought back or killed. X was an exception. These questions are only compounded when CM meets X's former husband and, after that, speaks to her son. CM keeps searching, peeling back layer after layer of her wife's life, her first years in the Western and then Northern Territories, her past loves, her many aliases, jobs, and disguises, much of which will inform and become her later art. While they were married, CM knew X would leave without telling her where she was going for blocks of time with no explanation. She walked on eggshells. However, she had no clue about her wife's past. She slowly unravels X's life and all her mysteries. The more she learns, the more Lucca is deeply unsettled about what she meant to her wife. I found it interesting in the NYT article where Lacey (author) decided soon after starting this project, "she would have to rewrite American history just to create a stage on which two women can have a relationship that doesn't have to be justified." Her novel envisions an alternate U.S. — one in which the country broke apart and the vast majority of the South seceded in 1945, establishing a patriarchal theocracy that lasted for decades. In this history, the political activist Emma Goldman became the governor of Illinois and eventually F.D.R.'s chief of staff, pushing for the New Deal to include protections for same-sex marriage and immigration rights. In addition, there are re-imaginings of countercultural scenes from the '70s and '80s from pop culture, artists, musicians, art, politics, literature, and beyond. The author seamlessly alters and repurposes the work and words of countless artists and writers, making this a fun adventure. So who was X? The novel is kind of like social media and the Instagram world. People are intrigued by the outward fake person but not fully interested in knowing the real person. Only what they are perceived to be. Genre-bending, character-driven, and smartly written, a cross between literary fiction and psychological thriller —BIOGRAPHY OF X is about C.M. as much as it is about X. A thought-provoking novel with dark themes about what we give up when we love someone. Here CM was giving up a part of herself. She had to grieve for her wife's loss and stories she told herself about a woman she did not know. Ultimately grieving for the time she gave up while questioning her own life. How many of us are unknowable—even and especially to ourselves? #JDCMustReadBooks
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com