Charlotte Hughes
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 416 pages, $28
The allure of Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X brings to mind the opening line of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer:
Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments.
Lacey’s protagonist, C.M. Lucca, is both the credulous widow and the journalist. When Lucca’s wife, the brilliantly eccentric New York artist known as X, dies of a random heart attack, an “authoritative” biography is published by art-world writer Theodore Smith.
These particulars of X’s life – her journalist wife, her tortured-artist persona – are new to Lacey’s work, but the preoccupation with the singular yet changing self is a theme that Lacey has continually probed throughout her work.
In Biography of X, Lucca embarks on a project to write a better biography, one that exactly understands X’s life. The novel is at once the product of Lucca’s journalistic project and an account of how the project came to be, recalling the countless hours spent tracking down sources and probing them in interviews. Biography of X lays bare the process of journalism and the ways in which eminently “accurate” and “authoritative” narratives such as the biography are created. In doing so, the book suggests that (X’s) death was as complicated as (her) life, containing myth, tragedy, and contradiction.
As readers — and X’s biographer and wife C.M. Lucca — learn throughout the book, the claustrophobic limitation of having only one self confounded X. The bounds and limits of personhood frustrated her. She did not call her critics and fellow artists “people” but a “carbon-copied army of beings allegedly calling themselves people.”
If X, as the subject and posthumous protagonist of Biography of X, wants to be a character in the plural rather than singular, X’s biographer CM Lucca wants to be less than a character. Her journalistic “treachery,” to use Malcolm’s term, is not so much as to misrepresent others but as to annihilate herself in the craft, escaping her individual identity.
While working at a newspaper before her marriage to X, Lucca harbors a desire for her “name to vanish into the paper’s name.” She rarely mentions her home life. She only achieves success at the paper when she joins the fundamentalist cult HXWZM undercover, working on an investigative story to expose the cult’s dysfunction and abuse. Others call the published story groundbreaking, and the story eventually wins a Pulitzer Prize, but Lucca simply calls it an “accident of luck and timing.”
While undercover, pretending to be a cult member, Lucca finds the extreme lack of focus on the selfi relieving. She is “no longer [her] own subject.” At the novel’s conclusion, Lucca, thinking of X, finds that “we’ve lost, I’ve lost, you’ve lost, and I’ve lost my self most of all and I hope to never find her again.”
Lucca’s psychology in the novel veers close to the states of mind and self that have fascinated Catherine Lacey throughout her career. In her earlier fiction, She focused, time and again, on the subject of the repressed female narrator.
In “Family Physics”, a story out of the collection Certain American States published in 2018, Lacey’s protagonist feels, vaguely, for no articulable reason, “that it was a huge misunderstanding, my being in this family.” She cannot quite articulate the problem with her family, though, beyond a sense of unease about her relationships with them––particularly her relationship with her sister Linda––being in a state of constant flux. To Lacey’s narrator, “something about the new Linda was so menacing that it made [her] suspicious of what she’d done with the old Linda.”
The narrator of Lacey’s 2014 novel Nobody Is Ever Missing shows the reader over the course of 250 pages the ways in which she suppresses her emotions. Attempting to hitchhike along a freeway, she “decided to “to try to look happy because [she] thought someone might be more inclined to pick up someone who was happy. I am happy, [she] told [herself], I am a happy person.” She never questions what the accompanying effects of her pretending to be happy are. Their repressed affects create an leaves the reader with a feeling of gliding down a river on a teetering boat with no idea of how dangerous or deep the water — the emotions — might be below the placid surface.
Throughout these previous books — Certain American States, Nobody Is Ever Missing, Pew, and The Answers — Lacey depicts protagonists and characters who — ever-changing, repressed — are difficult to understand.
Like Lacey’s earlier protagonists, in writing X’s biography and viewing a virtual slide projector of people from X’s past lives in the process, Lucca , confronts the prisms of personae that X assumed through her art, beginning with her childhood in the Christian fundamentalist “Southern Territory,” to her life in the progressive “Northern Territory” and New York City. Lucca finds that X, born Carolina Luanna Walker in Byhalia, Mississippi, grew up in poverty, became pregnant in high school, and participated in the Revelation Rifle Affair of 1968, detonating dynamite outside of a rifle factory in an attempt to destabilize the Southern Territory.
Those names — Northern Territory, Southern Territory — gesture towards another element of Lacey’s baroque autobiography-in-process-within-a-novel: alternate history. Lacey imagines the present-day United States as having split in three (North, South, and West) after the Southern Territory became a theocratic authoritarian state controlled by church leaders.
The only religion in Biography of X is the religion of the Southern Territory fundamentalists, who understand their world in strictly Manichaean terms, dividing the “good” from the bad. Engaging in the act of moral “splitting,” the Southern Territory fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge the possibility that good and bad can be matters of degree or can blend.
Unlike the religious fundamentalists of the Southern Territory, Lucca attempts to bring the dual qualities of X into one cohesive and realistic whole throughout the course of Biography of X. Reflecting on her marriage to X, Lucca wonders, “And might I -- despite how much I had deified and worshiped X and believed her to be pure genius -- might I now accept the truth of her terrible, raw, answer and boundless cruelty?”
Interviewing X’s old lovers, friends, and colleagues in an attempt to construct X’s biography, Lucca sees X as both — the often-cruel lover and the refugee from the authoritarian Southern Territories to the Northern Territory and the artistic genius.
Lucca comes to understand X’s art more clearly. X’s answer, in this case, laid in her magnum opus piece of performance art, The Human Subject. X had dozens of alter egos over the course of decades. She tried to solve the problem of having a body, Lucca realizes, by multiplying herself, crafting the illusion of having many bodies under many names.
As some interview subjects remember X as one persona from The Human Subject and others remember her as another, and others remember her as yet another throughout the course of the book, Lucca’s project becomes more and more difficult.
Her [X’s] life will not become a historical object,” Lucca told her rival biographer Theodore Smith, before embarking on her own biography at the beginning of Biography of X. “Only her work will remain.”
However, it becomes apparent that, for X, life and art are so thoroughly intertwined that her life does remain as a kind of historical artifact, in the form of The Human Subject,.
Lucca is perhaps aware of the central question of the shifting self from the first page of the novel, when, upon X’s death, she considers that:
One and a half people kill themselves in the city each day, and I looked for them --- the one person or the half person --- but I never saw the one and I never saw the half, no matter how much I looked and waited, patiently, so patiently, and after some time I wondered if I could not find them because I was one of them, either the one or the half.
Lucca returns to this question of the shifting self throughout the biography that she attempts to write, as along the way, she discovers shocking secrets about X in the course of her interviews, and confronts countless challenges in making sense of her life and death. By the end of the novel, the reader realizes what X and Lucca have been looking for all along. While X had been grasping at an alternative to the singular self in her art––a way to be plural––Lucca has perhaps found her own answer, her way to be “a half person” or to embody “one [different] person” – in allowing herself to disappear into X’s many past lives.