I just finished and highly recommend Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey. It’s a fictional biography of a multi-hyphenate downtown New York artist from the 70s. It’s an alternate history of the United States. It’s a meditation on identity. It’s an investigation of what it means to make art. And it’s an obsessive love story, written by a widow who’s blinded by anger and grief.
Audrey Wollen’s excellent review in The New Yorker will give you a taste of what you’re in for.
Lucca’s biography begins with a wail of grief, and a repudiation of history. Lucca, the narrator and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is mourning the death of her wife, X, a maverick star of the art world, who built such a baroque structure of mystery around herself that even Lucca struggles to identify whom she has lost, whom her widowhood honors. X has done everything, been everyone: a conceptual artist à la Sophie Calle, a lyricist and producer on David Bowie’s “Low,” a stripper in Times Square alongside Kathy Acker, an interlocutor with the feminist Carla Lonzi, a fiction writer who inspired Denis Johnson, a terrorist on the run, even a secret F.B.I. agent. Familiar uncertainties – Who was this person whom I loved? Did I ever know her? Is it possible to love what one cannot know? – turn into a far-reaching, propulsive detective story that spans the last half of the twentieth century.
The question driving Lucca’s investigation appears, at first, to be a simple one: What was her wife’s name?
Four passages I highlighted, just to give you a taste:
Page 33:
But I know now a person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them, and no matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drips at the edges, then rushes out completely. People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.
Page 140:
“Is life in the small things, in songs or stories, or is in the large things, in the country, its laws, in the liberty and safety of others?”
Page 175:
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. On some level you must know this already or have suspected it all along — but what, if anything, can be done about it? How do you escape the confinement of being a person who allows the past to control you when the past itself is nonexistent?
And finally, page 269 – one small example of the world building Lacey does throughout the novel:
Though it is difficult to imagine now, the occupation of “artist” in America was seen, prior to World War II, almost exclusively as a male calling; it was only through the intersection of a variety of economic and cultural events that this stereotype was inverted and women were seen as the sex to whom “art” belonged. (Why it had to belong to one sex or another is another matter entirely.) Many have identified the Painters’ Massacre of 1943 as a crucial turning point in this reversal. In December of that year, a mob of Southern separatists stormed an opening at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York, killing fourteen male artists – Marchel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock among them – while sparing all the women. This act of terrorism might have been more well-known if it hadn’t been one of the less-deadly incidents perpetrated by similar groups; as it stands, it appears more often in art history books than in books on the Great Disunion.
So good. Go read it.