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the complete review - fiction

Biography of X

by
Catherine Lacey

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : clever idea(s), but falls short of its potential

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Mostly enjoyed what Lacey does and how she does it

  From the Reviews:

• "Biography of X is a meticulously assembled work, complete with fictional footnotes for invented interviews, apparent photographs of X in her youth and extracts of her miscellaneous correspondence. (...) It’s a thriller set against a backdrop of political intrigue, an elegy, an art world satire and a thought experiment too. (...) Biography of X never feels like an intellectual exercise. Instead, it suggests how in the vacuum left by truth, comes fiction -- speculative and surprising." - Shahidha Bari, Financial Times
  
  
• "Biography of X is presented to the reader as a simulacrum of a nonfiction work. This is an enchantingly strange proposition and, like Pew, it only gets stranger. (...) There’s something wondrous about the way the book backs into its high concept. (...) There is so much that’s impressive about this book. It makes you think afresh about America and American history. It roves over the muddy trenches of identity politics while saying things that are original and not parti pris. At its centre, X is a charismatic, tantalising figure who takes aim at all orthodoxies. My one quibble with the novel is that there’s a tendency to apostrophise too much about the puzzles of love, art and identity at the heart of the book. The courageous world-building and bold storytelling carry these themes without any need for additional rhetorical flourishes." - Marcel Theroux, The Guardian
  
  
• "The book feels densely populated, like a party where you keep getting distracted from the conversation you're having because people keep walking in. (...) Against the book's impulse to make friends is the idea that political separation may be the only way certain desirable civic conditions can come to pass." - Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books
  
  
• "At first read, Lacey’s dedication to the bizarro-world reality of this novel was irksome. I was more interested in her sentences (.....) But the ending of this novel changed my thinking and confirmed that Lacey is one of the most fearless novelists writing today. (...) Biography of X is also about power." - Jessica Ferri, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "This playful telling of fictive stories featuring some of the most iconic figures in 20th-century pop culture would be enough for an entertaining novel. But Lacey doesn’t stop there: she rewrites the history of America too. (...) Biography of X is a work of wonder, written with brilliant attention to detail. " - Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman
  
  
• "C.M.’s voice, with its withdrawn quality and intimations of ruin, is an odd one to preside over a novel this sprawling and ambitious, this strange and dystopian and vividly imagined. (...) It’s a hard book to get a handle on. (...) This is a magpie novel, one that borrows snatches of text, that tinkers with reputations, that moves historical figures around in time. (...) By its second half, Biography of X has begun to drag somewhat. (...) But you will already be locked in. This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
  
  
• "The result is not really a book-within-a-book but, rather, a book encased in the glistening film of a different title, author, and genre. (...) Biography of X is built from these carapaces, historical figures without the meat of their lived deeds and principles. Names, Lacey proposes, are merely vessels, as X so brazenly demonstrates, and anything can be poured inside. (...) Lacey’s willingness to use and misuse every kind of material comes with a certain thrill. But, without an underlying pattern, Biography of X acts more as a blender than a quilt-maker, whirring the twentieth century into a blur and sacrificing cause and effect. At times, it felt like icons and actions were paired through chance, scribbled identities licked and pressed onto the unseeing foreheads of cultural moments. The law of the random would be a more generous interpretation. An alternative one is that boundless irreverence can often gravitate toward a strange and impetuous conservatism." - Audrey Wollen, The New Yorker
  
  
• "This uncategorisable novel is above all an exercise in world-building, one that raises questions about what ‘fiction’ means. It is mesmerising, 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." - Claire Lowdon, The Spectator
  
  
• "The outlandish plot of Biography of X is an excellent conduit for Lacey -- our flesh-and-blood author -- to continue exploring the preoccupations of her earlier works: grief and the impulse towards self-destruction; art and fame; religious intolerance; the mutability of identity; the pain of realising you no longer know, or perhaps never knew, the person you loved. As usual, she renders this material with lucidity and wit, and Lacey fans will also appreciate the reappearance of her virtuosic long sentences. Foolish or not, I couldn’t help finding it all heartbreakingly real." - Gabrielle Schwarz, The Telegraph
  
  
• "The author convinces us by the sheer inventiveness of her artifice. (...) Biography of X is the author’s most ambitious and enjoyable novel yet, filled with the subversive humour and verve only hinted at in her previous books. Complete with the full academic apparatus of footnotes and “original” images from X’s life, it is consistently playful and inventive. Even if some of its targets are low-hanging fruit, and the satire is a little blunt, we get the sense of a writer hitting a rich seam and mining it for all it’s worth." - Jude Cook, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(B)rilliant, astonishing (.....) X herself, and her prodigious oeuvre, is an amalgam of nearly every important cultural figure in late-20th-century writing, music and art. (...) The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse." - Chris Kraus, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Biography of X is a book within a book. It comes with a title-page presenting it as 'A Novel' by Catherine Lacey and then a corresponding copyright-page; a few blank pages -- first black then increasingly lighter shades of grey -- later comes an almost identical title-page, but this time without it being described as a novel, and with the author now named: C.M.Lucca; a copyright page follows that dates the book to 2005, rather than 2023. So too at the end we find 'A Note about the Author' C.M.Lucca -- noting she was born in 1957 and promising: "This is her first and last book" -- before eventually also coming to 'A Note about the Author' Catherine Lacey.
       The text that C.M.Lucca writes is a 'Biography of X', her now deceased wife. She writes in the first person, and her narrative is more about how she goes about investigating X's life and what she uncovers than straightforward biography. She also explains what motivated her: another biography of X, by one Theodore Smith, A Woman Without a History, that Lucca detests (and argues is error-strewn) but which has: "been held up as the definitive account of X's life". Lucca is particularly outraged that Smith didn't even get X's birthplace and parents right -- though at the time she, too, did not know where X had actually been born or who here parents were, she just knew Smith got it wrong, and:

     I never intended to write a corrective biography -- if that is what this book is. All I wanted at first was to find out where my wife had been born, and I imagined I might publish my findings as an essay, and article, or perhaps a lawsuit, something to quickly discredit Mr.Smith.

     It is her explicit wish not to be captured in a biography, not now and not after she's gone.

     At one point on that first walk I told her that I'd heard about her work, and that I found it all quite suspicious.
     There's nothing to suspect about me, she said. I don't hide anything.
     I said I wasn't so sure.
     And you shouldn't be. You shouldn't be sure of anything.

Though women had federally mandated equal pay, free child care, access to birth control, and equal representation in government and most professions -- and even though there was overwhelming national support for the policies that had led to these advancements -- tenacious forms of sexism still existed within the culture, according to many.

You are not your name, you are not what you have done, you are not what people see, you are not what you see or what you have seen.

- M.A.Orthofer, 27 May 2023

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Links:

• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page
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• Q & A at AnOther
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• Open Letters Review
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• The Scotsman
• Shelf Awareness
• Star Tribune
• Three Guys One Book
• Vulture

• Official site

• See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

       American author Catherine Lacey was born in 1985.

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© 2023 the complete review

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