Biography of X
By Catherine Lacey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

“Ambition was the worst sin,” a minor character tells the narrator of Biography of X, “wanting any dominance over someone else.” Catherine Lacey’s novel is full of this “sin”: the life-long domineering actions of the protagonist, an artist who names herself “X”; the book-long revenge on X by her widow and narrator of the novel. And, perhaps, Lacey’s attempted dominance of her readers with her incessant literary game-playing. That former chess master Nabokov thought of his novels as games with and against readers. Perhaps the most ambitious was Pale Fire in which a crazed Russian émigré purports to interpret the life and work of an American poet who is the Russian’s neighbor. Intimate domination, the worst sin in Biography of X.

Lacey’s game begins right after her real title page: a fake title page that presents “C. M. Lucca” as the author of Biography of X. The former journalist Lucca decides to look into some lacunae in a doorstop biography of X by Theodore Smith, a book that Lucca finds banal and “worthless.” For Lucca, a “life” was disrespectful of the many lives led by the shape-shifting X—who used pseudonyms for her writing, work with famous musicians, and numerous art installations. Disrespectful also because X resisted and resented anyone, even her wife, who might delve into her past and secrets, of which Lucca finds plenty. After ferreting out the crucial secret of X’s birth and childhood, Lucca becomes extremely ambitious, traveling the U.S. and abroad to interview people who knew X at different stages of her life and to dig up presumably lost documents. Begun as a project of rage against Smith and grief for the recently deceased X, Lucca’s biography ends with anger against the sadistic X and a different kind of grief, that of never knowing the woman that Lucca loved and was dominated by.

Lucca’s scholarly project--that plods through the chronology of X’s life and is replete with a scaffolding of fake notes and altered sources--was easy enough for Lacey to imitate. What was not so easy was establishing the artistic genius of X and her ability to find wives, friends, collaborators—just about everyone she met—to dominate. X’s output was prodigious, but since her works—unlike those by, say, Kathy Acker who was a friend of X and perhaps one model for Lacey—don’t exist, Lacey’s creative ambition is tested. Readers get short descriptions of X’s visual works and critics’ responses, as well as Lucca’s, to them, but the works described never convinced me that X was a towering multimedia artist of the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps I would be a believer if I saw more of her novels. Excerpts could have been included (just as Pale Fire begins with a 999-line poem). And X’s paintings and sculptures could have been created and photographed—if Lacey’s ambition was equal to the “ferocious ambitions” of her subject.

Once I’m unconvinced of X as artist, I’m skeptical about her domination of or large influence on others’ personal lives. Maybe not Lucca’s, who seemed a doormat when she met X, but historical figures such as David Bowie, Wim Wenders, and Denis Johnson. When Lucca interviews X’s long-lost family or her former lovers or her gallerist or an Italian political activist, none of them is capable of explaining X’s magnetic power. It doesn’t seem to be erotic. More neurotic, her intense need to impress others while simultaneously alienating them. If I were interviewed, I might say—without really knowing X—that she was a three-headed fusion of Acker, Martina Obramaovic, and Susan Sontag on speed.

Since I don’t believe in X, I don’t believe Lucca. Biography of X may be a fiction—Lucca’s fiction—within Lacey’s novel. In Pale Fire, Nabokov signals his biographer’s unreliability by having him believe he is the escaped king of Zembla. Lucca is merely an escapee from a boring marriage, but she has plenty of motives to write a fictive take-down of X. Lacey’s unreliability tip is exaggeration—the obsessiveness of Lucca’s project, along with X’s hyper-protean character and Lacey’s own game-playing with actual quotes she has repurposed to describe X. A lot of ideas, invention, and research went into Biography of X, but ultimately its ambition doesn’t reach me—or dominate me as it seems to have some raving reviewers.

Lacey does herself no favors by setting her unreliable text in a counterfactual space. Yes, there are many realistic scenes in downtown New York City, but it exists in something Lacey calls the Northern Territory. Right after World War II, southern states seceded to become a theocracy (from which, spoiler alert, X escapes). Now the USA is composed of the former Southern Territory, the Northern Territory, and the Western Territory (from which X also escapes). The counterfactuals allow a good deal of easy (not very ambitious) satire and, I guess, fun since Emma Goldman is FDR’s former chief of staff in the North. Unfortunately, though, the invented setting diminishes the reality of the invented characters who occupy it.

X was a master of style, of unconventional costumes and disguises, a pre Lady Gaga. X was also very good at sophistical sentences and cutting remarks. She could do accents. The few journal entries that Lucca quotes about X’s unhappiness as a woman could be profound or sophomoric. Lucca, unfortunately, is a master of journalism with a conventional sensibility and reliance on the language of victimhood. If X had written her own autobiography in Lucca’s style, it would have been something like Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The biographer/interpreter in Pale Fire may be a schizoid academic, but he still sounds like a Nabokov creation. Perhaps Lacey chose a rather pedestrian style for her narrator as a way to elicit belief in her improbable protagonist, but Lucca’s prose is not a way to make this reader believe in X or her biography, no matter who wrote it.

Is it possible everything in Biography of X is a parody: of the performing celebrity (think Warhol), of the insider biography (like the one Roth wanted), of political clichés (the southerners are dumb), of Pale Fire (high art)? Biography of X even seems to parody Sebald’s inclusion of photos in his fictions. Lacey has numerous photographs that are supposed to suggest the mystery of X but actually manage only to satisfy the conventions of biography. Maybe even written language is a parody--of speaking, of live dialogue or performance, a notion suggested by the talk marathons that X has when she meets new intimates. Lucca and Lacey both throw up their hands at times and imply “you just had to be there.” I wasn’t.

I usually have a high tolerance for Lacey’s kind of literary ambition and game-playing, even that which extends into excess. I can say I almost finished the thousand-plus pages of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. I looked forward to the seventeen volumes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “Familiar” project. But the parodic academic biography is a tough act to pull off at great length. Biography of X would have been a better novel, perhaps dominating my disbelief, had the book been half its length. Siri Hustvedt’s novel Blazing World about a radical feminist artist in New York is the same length as Lacey’s novel, but Hustvedt is more narrow in her purview—less ambitious, perhaps, but more believable, more emotionally engaging. Everyone in Biography of X--both women and men, straight and gay--finds X fascinating, but they might not if—like me--they read all of Lucca’s “biography.”

The initial impetus of Lucca’s research is the work of a male biographer and critic. Perhaps Lacey is playing a game against me, the male reviewer who, she may believe, will reveal gender bias with his lack of sympathy for the woman warrior, the feminist outlaw, the art monster. Since that’s a possibility, don’t write off Lacey. But I recommend getting on the wait list at the library and sampling fifty pages of Biography of X before you plunk down twenty-eight bucks. Visual artist and verbal provocateur, X was also a scam artist, relieving people of their money. Caveat emptor.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels, including one (Passing Again) that resembles Biography of X.