What if Reagan went Green – and lost?

Catherine Lacey’s crafty new novel interweaves art, politics and some quirky alternative history

416pp, Granta, T £18.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £11.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

When I first opened Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel, I had a moment of confusion. The book begins with a disclaimer – “this is a work of fiction” – followed by a title and copyright page naming the author as “CM Lucca” and the publication date as 2005. Had I come across an error of the kind that sometimes appears in an uncorrected proof?

The mistake was mine. Biography of X is an intricately crafted work of fictional biography, in which CM (Charlotte Marie) Lucca is our narrator. She has undertaken to write the life of her late wife, the titular X, and the book accordingly comes with the apparatus of nonfiction: a contents page; meticulous footnotes; grainy black-and-white photographs purporting to show people, places and objects mentioned in the text.

This experimental structure marks a departure for Lacey, whose previous books – from her 2014 debut Nobody is Ever Missing, which established her as a literary talent to watch, to 2020’s Pew – are more straightforwardly framed. But the American writer’s work has always been rife with improbable, even fantastical, scenarios and characters. Pew, for instance, is narrated by a person of indeterminate gender and race who wakes up in a church one day with no recollection of their past. What grounds Lacey’s stories is the vivid psychological realism of her prose – by turns laugh-out-loud funny and painfully sad.

CM’s task is complicated by both her lack of objectivity and her enigmatic subject. X was a multihyphenate celebrity – artist, writer, music producer, publisher, socialite – who assumed various invented identities at different points in her lifetime. To CM’s knowledge, X never disclosed, in public or private, her actual name or age or place of birth, and she refused to co-operate with biographers on the grounds (as CM explains) that “making fiction was sacred” and that any attempts to pin her down would “necessarily be false”. As if to prove her point, when a hack named Theodore Smith writes her first posthumous biography, it’s littered with factual inaccuracies – and profoundly dull. CM knows that the book she’s writing is an even greater betrayal; but over the course of her investigations into X’s past, she makes certain discoveries which leave her feeling that she too has been betrayed.

The layers of fact and fiction extend beyond X’s self-fashioning

to the world – an alternative history – that Lacey has constructed. Familiar historical figures appear with details out of whack: the poet Frank O’Hara, for example, has in this universe survived the 1966 car crash that killed his real-life counterpart. Ronald Reagan, here leader of the Green Party, lost the 1980 presidential election. We are told that a few months after the end of the Second World War, a huge wall was erected to separate the newly established “Southern Territory” from the rest of America. The theocratic government that ruled over this territory from 1945 until reunification in 1996 ( just weeks after X’s death) put teenage girls in “birth-houses” to be impregnated by older men, and made public stonings commonplace. Such historical context, CM believes, is crucial to understanding X’s shape-shifting life and work.

But Biography of X is not a dystopian novel. For one thing, it doesn’t take itself seriously enough. As CM observes of one of her interview subjects during a research trip to the former Southern Territory: “A grown man unable to pour himself a glass of milk… This is the sort of person an authoritarian theocracy produces.” Besides, most of the story unfolds in the Northern Territory, a place where feminism has gone so far that male artists are now protesting over their exclusion from museums and galleries.

The outlandish plot of Biography of X is an excellent conduit for Lacey – our flesh-and-blood author – to continue exploring the preoccupations of her earlier works: grief and the impulse towards selfdestruction; art and fame; religious intolerance; the mutability of identity; the pain of realising you no longer know, or perhaps never knew, the person you loved.

As usual, she renders this material with lucidity and wit, and Lacey fans will also appreciate the reappearance of her virtuosic long sentences. Foolish or not, I couldn’t help finding it all heartbreakingly real.

Don’t look away: Lacey has become a leading novelist of her generation