Biography of X
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In honor of the 10 year anniversary of this book blog, I’ve asked a few VIP book lovers to write guest reviews. This review is by Molly Collins, a newish friend who is now stuck with me forever! Here’s her review of Biography of X:
(all the fires, every one of them)
Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is many kinds of books in one. At the most base level, it is a fictional novel written in the style of a biography, one that tells the story of a polymath artist named X narrated by X’s widow, CM Lucca, shortly after her wife’s unexpected and untimely death. Within the first few pages, however, it becomes clear that this is much more than just the retelling of X’s life. For Lucca, it is a dissection of her marriage, a globe-trotting adventure to discover who the woman she was married to actually was. It’s also a subtly horrifying rendering of a not-impossible alternate history, one that digs into the brutal heart of American political culture today. And finally, and perhaps most fiercely, it is a love story—but more on that later.
All told, it is a book of incredible depth and imagination, and its blended exploration of topics make it a unique delicacy for fans of history and psychology alike, while Lacey’s extensive musings on art and politics make it a fascinating read for anyone interested in those topics, or just for us good old-fashion literary fiction nerds. If you’re looking for comparisons, perhaps Patricia Lockwood plus Ursula Le Guin, with an extra dash of flowery prose sprinkled in.
The novel unfolds as we follow Lucca’s quest to unravel the duplicitous and deliberately manifold lives that her wife had led. While the book starts with perhaps its most intimate portrait of X—the pining lover, a thoughtful artist with a star-crossed crush on a woman who is already married—we quickly learn that there are in fact many sides to this woman who goes by a single letter, and Lucca, our narrator and the object of X’s desire, begins to learn how few of these sides she really knew. After a heartfelt recounting of their first meetings, Lucca thrusts us back into the present, into her intense grief over her late wife, and the beginning of her journey to excavate the truth about the artist named X.
From there, we learn of X’s many lives and personas—a world-famous musician, an iconoclastic novelist seemingly from nowhere, a firebrand political activist living in Italy, and many more that I won’t list for fear of spoiling any more of her wild history. I’ll admit, reading about X’s journey and her continual reformation of her own identity is inspiring, and it’s a reminder that it’s really never too late to explore all the ridiculous and self-satisfying pursuits that you’ve always half-dreamed of doing. X undoubtedly embodies a spirit and a mindset most of us have, at one time or another, longed for—the ability to be flexible about one’s self and your identity, to constantly recreate who you are and, in doing so, allowing yourself the freedom to become new every day, to not be bound to the self that already exists. These sections of the novel are glittering portraits of roaring New York socialite culture, intimate glimpses of humble lives in small towns, and other fascinating and delightful snapshots that read almost like a collection of short stories on their own. As Lucca muses at one point, it is always a strange reminder “how narrowly we become ourselves and not some adjacent other,” and for X, there was never a need to be simply one of those, to not also be all the others.
Her ability to do that, however, is borne from a deeply traumatic, fictious revision of US history. In the early pages of Lacey’s novel, we learn that X, as well as her narrating widow, grew up in an America that severed itself at the end of the Second World War, slicing a sharp line between a ring-wing Christian autocracy that has taken over the South and a more leftist, socialist-adjacent culture in the remaining states, one that feels not dissimilar from modern-day northern Europe. While secondary to the main thrust of the novel, I found Lucca’s reflections on the South—and her discovery of X’s ties to this haunting mirror reality—to be some of the poignant pages of the entire story. Despite spending her entire life in the liberated north, when describing her interactions with fastidious supporters of her theocratic neighbors, Lucca encourages her readers to remember how powerful faith can be and how deeply we all want to have hope in something, be it a political system, a personal dream, or—in her case—another person.
This brings me back to the central theme of the novel that is both superficially obvious and distinctly hidden. As mentioned earlier, Biography of X is, at its heart, a love story. But it is not a clean one, and in some ways not a very satisfying one either. X’s love is vicious, it’s terrible and terrifying and as we read we learn that it is as wounding as it is intoxicating. The central questions driving the book forward—and, I assure you, what keeps you turning those pages—are ‘who was X, really’ and, for Lucca each time she learns something shockingly new about her deceased wife, ‘why do I still love her?’ The depths of complexity of her feelings about X are as fascinating as X herself, and Lucca is painfully aware of her own unreliability as a narrator. Within this story, we also see how fiercely X battled her own inner turmoil to love herself. All of this is folded into the many other perspectives that Lucca/Lacey tie in—each chapter is based loosely around an interview or research excavation Lucca conducted about a particular person in X’s life, letting us see the titular character not just from the perspective of her wife and herself but from friends, long-lost family, recipients of both her charity and her scorn, her enemies and her champions. Each of these too are in their own way another love story.
All in all, Lacey’s newest book is a beautiful novel. Her writing never ceases to hook you in, and each feeling of Lucca’s, be it fear or frustration or joy, hits you as sharply as if it were your own. If you are looking for some light reading to prompt you to question the meaning of love and loyalty and the juxtaposed truths at the core of American culture (light reading, right?), Biography of X is your next go-to read.
