Catherine Lacey’s Provocative Novel in Disguise

The first thing that you notice about Catherine Lacey’s new novel is the lack of a determiner. Nouns float, unhooked from any article. I found myself habitually inserting “The” in the title when the book came up in conversation, that brief sound of specificity, the most common word in the English language and the most wishful. As you open Lacey’s “Biography of X,” turning past the expected copyright and title, you reach a sequence of gradually lightening blacked-out pages, “Tristram Shandy” turned flip-book. Darkness lifts to reveal a second, nested title page, for a slightly different book: “Biography of X,” by C. M. Lucca. This copyright reads “2005,” rather than “2023”; you might rustle back a couple of pages to compare, and notice, on Lacey’s title page, the subheading “A Novel,” missing in C. M. Lucca’s version. Both title pages mention the same publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It makes sense that there is no “the”—or “a” or “this” or “my”—in Lacey’s title, as the project that the title alludes to quickly slips from its grasp. “X” is already a placeholder for the undetermined, the interchangeable, the illiterate, or the nameless. And “biography”? The whole story of a whole life, an aspiration that glides so flush into the corners of the untrue that one could easily assume that fiction is its rightful category, its most logical shape.

Lacey’s book, which is trimmed with photographs, historical data, collected interviews, and secondary sources, joins a recent spate of critically acclaimed novels that adorn themselves with the formal signifiers of nonfiction—imaginary footnotes or citations, the haze of archival research, narratives that peel themselves from the individual and float over a wider range. Benjamín Labatut’s “When We Cease to Understand the World” drifts through histories of scientific discovery with fantastical insertions. Hernan Diaz’s “Trust” builds itself in reverse across three backstories. Lucy Ives’s “Life Is Everywhere” manifests Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by including all the books, one an academic monograph, that are found in a character’s handbag. “Biography of X” sheds the container, with no frame story to situate the discovery of its inner document. C. M. Lucca’s fictional biography makes up the entirety of Lacey’s novel. 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. As they accumulated on the floor by my bed, part of my own purse’s detritus, alongside scattered lip glosses and a wriggle of empty tights, I started to think of these books as novels in the drag of nonfiction, a flamboyant application of familiar norms, less an effort to convince than to reveal our shared methods of convincing—academic authority drawn onto the text like eyebrows pitched across a forehead, bibliographies sticky with wig glue. As Lacey’s X declares, riffing off RuPaul, “Even the body is a drag, all our names are drag, and memory was the most profound drag of all.”

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? An incorrect answer is circulating through another biography of X (“A Woman Without a History,” by Theodore Smith, which Lucca reviles), published hastily after X dies unexpectedly. Smith claims to have discovered X’s birthplace, and with it a name that Lucca knows to be fabricated: Dorothy Eagle, of Missoula, Montana. Lucca experiences this false unveiling as a violation. X, famed for her various personas, always banished the fixed past from their shared life, gladly affirming every rumor or theory, however contradictory, about her origin. For X, Lucca writes, “making fiction was sacred . . . and she wanted to live in that sanctity, not to be fooled by the flimsiness of perceived reality, which was nothing more than a story that had fooled most of the world.” Their marriage was riddled with X’s violence toward Lucca, rewritten as paroxysms of devotion, and her infidelity, rewritten as fate. Other women, visitors from X’s seemingly infinite worlds, loiter outside their apartment.

It is clear that X wished to remain permanently past-less, the true American Dream, but Lucca cannot resist correcting the conceited Mr. Smith, to “avenge reality itself,” as she puts it. Violating X’s edict, she embarks on a journey to discover all the selves her wife accumulated in the course of her life—eighteen names, at my count. As Lucca moves through Dorothy, Caroline, Maeve, Bee, Deena, Pamela, Martina, and Cassandra, X’s edges stutter into and out of focus. This kick line of egos serves as Lacey’s entryway to another alternate time line, grander in scale, one that tracks a dramatic fictional sundering of the United States. Lucca discovers that X’s date of birth coincides with “the Great Disunion” of 1945, also known as the Christian Coup, a secession of Southern states that occurred overnight on Thanksgiving, complete with a border wall, manned by armed guards, and the installation of a new “fascist theocracy.” X was born on the Southern side of the wall, as Caroline Luanna Walker of Byhalia, Mississippi, and is a refugee from the Southern Territory, an understandable cause of the desire for anonymity that anchored and delimited her life.

Lacey’s Christian Coup is not a new novelistic premise—Margaret Atwood’s recently ubiquitous “Handmaid’s Tale” is built on a similar overnight coup—but Lacey creates a particularly elaborate and polarized counterfactual world on its basis. What motivates this second attempt at the Confederacy is the well-established impetus behind much of American politics: retribution. Unexpectedly, the figure who sets this reaction in motion is the feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman. In reality, Goldman was deported from New York City to Russia in 1919 under the Anarchist Exclusion Act. In Lacey’s novel, Goldman instead becomes the socialist governor of Illinois, and later the chief of staff for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she influences to adjust the New Deal toward her principles of “Socialist Capitalism.” Under her direction, the United States legalizes same-sex marriage; succeeds in the “near-abolition” of prison; federally mandates equal pay for women, subsidies for housework, and paid maternal leave; and ratifies a fictional Twenty-second Amendment, a collection of laws that establish (unspecified) immigrant rights. All of this alienates and enrages the Southern states, which spend the next decade plotting their secession. In 1945, the same year as the Disunion, Goldman is assassinated.

Lacey shucks Goldman from her name, craggy and pearled, and drains the soft salt of reality out to repurpose the shell. The real Goldman wrote in 1908 that she believed private property to be “not only a hindrance to human well-being, but an obstacle . . . to all progress”; the existence of state government, she claimed, was “necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly.” A “Socialist Capitalist,” whatever that may be, Goldman was not. Connie Converse, a virtuoso folksinger who intentionally vanished after a life of persistently unrecognized talent, co-writes her songs with X. Lacey amends her fate: after falling out with X, Converse survives, and winds up running a laundromat in Queens; in this version, obscurity—and loneliness—is bearable. “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 recycling of identities frequently extends to her own very alive contemporaries, a Who’s Who of writers and critics who are referenced anachronistically within the novel as commentators on X’s freewheeling career, such as Max Porter, Hito Steyerl, and Merve Emre. Names are not the only things plucked from their context. Lacey weaves appropriated quotations into the body of her text, Acker-like, aggregated from an extensive and associative library, which are unmarked in the text but credited in a Notes section in the back, a master key to Lacey’s research that contrasts with the unreality of Lucca’s footnotes found on the page. These excerpts are freely tailored, contorted, and collaged. (Full disclosure: I was surprised to find my own name in that same section, for a meme that I made many years ago. Oh, that’s me! I thought, in a quick slash of pride, a dangerous feeling for a critic.) The extent of “Biography of X” ’s use of plagiarism and authorial ambiguity became clear slowly, until eventually I was reading with one finger holding place in the Notes, flipping back and forth, consumed by the question that fidgeted underneath every resonant sentence: Who wrote these words? In that way, Lacey’s form skillfully evokes what her character Lucca is experiencing in the story itself: a reluctant disquiet and gnawing curiosity over the given material’s true source. And, to Lacey’s credit, I can’t remember the last time that I’ve read a recently published novel and amiably wondered if its narrative strategies were, in fact, completely legal.