Catherine Lacey’s new book is the second literary novel I’ve read recently to radically rewrite American history. In last year’s To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara imagined a different outcome for the Civil War: the Confederate states secede to become the thoroughly racist “United Colonies.” Up north are several political unions, such as the “Free States” (including New York), where gay marriage is not just legal but widespread by the end of the nineteenth century.
Lacey plants her sensational plot-twist a little later on the timeline. In Biography of X, “the Great Disunion” occurs at the end of World War Two, when a wall goes up around the “Southern Territory,” a theocratic entity eager to protect its citizens from the purportedly communist north. The south restores the death penalty by hanging and lapidation, and polices its citizens so heavily that the birthrate drops, owing to high incarceration levels. Meanwhile, in the north, the New Deal looks rather different. FDR, we learn, was heavily influenced by the anarchist Emma Goldman, resulting in “the plan to phase in same-sex marriage rights and a near abolition of the prison system.”
What exactly are Lacey and Yanagihara getting at? Is there perhaps an awkward apology contained within these delicious counterfactual exaggerations? Without the admixture of those southern barbarians, the States would be a much more enlightened place…
But for all the time Lacey spends constructing her alternative America, it’s technically just background detail for X’s story. X is an artist of substantial renown. A postmodern polymath with more than a whiff of Kathy Acker about her, she writes novels, makes movies and art, composes pop songs and produces records. The novel opens in the 1990s, shortly after the fall of the wall and reunification of the Northern and Southern Territories. By this point, X is dead. Her devastated widow, a woman known to the reader as CM, makes it her mission to track down the real facts of X’s mysterious life and write a corrective to a recent scurrilous biography.
That life is hard to research because X lived much of it as multiple people, assuming fake names and disguises so effective that she was unrecognizable even to those close to her. “She lived in a play without intermission, in which she’d cast herself in every role.” This prodigious capacity for shape-shifting echoes Lacey herself, whose oeuvre is a series of startling reinventions. Her eerie debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), is the story of a woman on the run from her own life; it is accomplished, highly readable and relatively conventional. Her second book, The Answers (2017), is a conceptual novel tinged with sci-fi. Interviewed about it, Lacey said: “The person who wrote Nobody Is Ever Missing, I can’t really speak on her behalf any more. The text is kind of what’s left of that person, and that person doesn’t exist any more.” It’s exactly the sort of thing that X would say.
Next came Lacey’s brilliant short story collection, Certain American States (2018), crackling with ideas and surprises. Her third novel, Pew (2020), is a frustrating fabular squib, voiced for a person who doesn’t know who they are or where they’ve come from. And now here is Biography of X, which — parallels with Yanagihara notwithstanding — is simply unlike any novel I’ve ever read. I’d love to know what discussions went on about legality at Granta because the book’s defining feature is its audacious use of real historical figures.
Everyone is in here, sometimes completely repurposed, sometimes playing themselves. X, we learn early on, kept a dark secret her whole life: she was born in the south and escaped as a very young woman after a botched act of resistance against the regime. In this she was abetted by Ted Gold and Kathy Boudin (in our reality, members of Weather Underground). The singer-songwriter Connie Converse plays a much larger role in the novel, as an abject girlfriend of X’s. David Bowie provides quotes about his time with X in Berlin; X, we learn, wrote both Bowie’s “Be My Wife” and Tom Waits’s “Better Off Without a Wife.” And not all the many real personages are dead. (I wonder how the artist Richard Serra might feel, picking up this novel, to discover himself guilty of casual chauvinism and of finding ‘endless occasions’ to pat the narrator’s lower back.)
All this is before we get on to the quotations, diligently footnoted, from real journalists such as Renata Adler, who reviewed X’s work, and Susan Sontag, with whom X corresponded. Lacey has woven a tissue of verisimilitude so detailed and dense that the human story of CM’s twisted relationship with X unfortunately gets a little lost.
This uncategorizable novel is above all an exercise in world-building, one that raises questions about what “fiction” means. It is mesmerizing, provocative, deeply impressive — and, ultimately, over-reliant on the special effects. Personally, I prefer the lower-budget attractions of the short story collection. But I will never not be interested in whoever Catherine Lacey chooses to be next.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
