Pity the writer of the literary biography; book critics have them practically teed up upon publication, ready to pounce on a genre that consistently lets them down. The critic can start out with one of Elizabeth Hardwick’s – currently the grand dame of literary criticism – many quotes about how much she despised biographies of writers, maybe something from her piece Joan Givner’s biography of Katherine Anne Porter: “a biography appears to be thought of as a good project, one that can at the very least be accomplished by industry… there is a lot of busywork in it… Our power of documentation has a monstrous life of its own, a greater vivacity than any lived experience. It makes form out of particles and finds attitude in a remembered drunken remark as easily as in a long contemplation of experience – more easily in fact. It creates out of paper a heavy, obdurate permanency.” From there, the critic can ping the book for not living up to its subject in various ways, whether it’s factual shortcomings, stylistic shortcomings, or being on the wrong side of fair to the subject and their work in either direction. Cathy Curtis, who just put out a biography of Elizabeth Hardwick herself, might be seen as the bravest person on Earth, as she had committed the biographer’s equivalent of standing under the basket and waiting for LeBron James to dunk on you: the reviews couldn’t be anything but unkind.
But perhaps the only braver thing that Curtis’s auto-da-fé would be to write the biography of a fictional artist, to take on all the problems that deaden writers and artists’ biographies in the pursuit of novelistic quality. That’s just what Catherine Lacey’s done with her new novel, Biography of X, whose ornate framing device establishes the book you’re holding as not a novel by Lacey but a 2005 biography by “CM Lucca,” a journalist, about her deceased wife X, a visionary and provocative musician/writer/painter/performance artist of the 20th century. If that isn’t wild enough for you, Lacey has also turned the faux-biography into a counterfactual history of the United States, imagining a timeline wherein the Southern states seceded from the country (again!) in 1945, splitting the country into autonomous zones à la North and South Korea or East and West Germany, the North a socialist paradise (with Emma Goldman in government!) and the South a fascist theocracy. (The West is for libertarians, naturally, though somehow Ronald Reagan turns out to be a Northern neo-con politician rather than the rugged Western individualist he projected himself as in our world.) There are many other changes big and small to ‘our’ reality: Frank O’Hara survived the car accident; Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp and Wassily Kandinsky were killed by terrorists; Bernie Sanders was president; Brian Eno is now Brianna Eno; Rachel Cusk’s piece about female artists is now Richard Cusk’s piece about male artists; and, well, you get the drift. It’s the 20th century you know and love in a funhouse mirror.
The copy, the blurbs and the early reviews have all latched onto the risk of such a project, on the sheer scale of what’s being attempted: Torrey Peters calls it “the most ambitious book I’ve ever read from a writer of my own generation,” Sara Novic lauds it as “a triumphant high-wire act,” Dwight Garner praised it as “sprawling and ambitious,” “vividly imagined,” and “notably audacious” in his New York Times rave, and Sam Sacks thought that the “audacity of this book… seems likely to bring her to a much wider audience” over in the Wall Street Journal. But ambition is not the same as quality, and The Biography of X leaves one wishing that ambition was made of sterner stuff. I’m glad this book isn’t another piece of drab autofiction about being a writer or a family epic about ‘generations of women,’ but I also wish that a good novel lived underneath all of Lacey’s whizbang experimentation.
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