Biography of X presents itself as a biography of a controversial artist named X whose work encompasses music, literature, film, painting, and performance art. The author is X's widow, who starts the project to rescue X's legacy from a bestselling hack biography.
X was best known for embodying numerous personae that rendered her true self unknowable even to those closest to her. Her widow tracks down the truth of her birth: X was born in and escaped from the Southern Territory, the theocratic region that split from the Northern and Western Territories in 1945 before Reunification in 1989. Yes, X's story plays out in an alternate reality.
I applaud Lacey's ambition. I wish, though, that the book more closely resembled an actual biography. We don't start with enough information about X or her work to know why we want to read about her. The "author" (X's widow) foregrounds her adventures while researching the book rather than X's life and times. X comes across as an unpleasant character with none of the charisma that would attract her many admirers.
I read one of Lacey's previous books several years ago. It too dealt with the splintering of one's social presentation, and it too felt overly ambitious. To quote myself: "I felt like there was too much going on, too many unusual situations without a realistic platform to view it from."
One aspect of Lacey's alternate reality is that since "the Painters' Massacre of 1943 ... [in which] Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock" were killed, the art world is dominated by women. In our world, it used to be said that all of the ambitious writers were male; David Foster Wallace called them "the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar American fiction." Reading Biography of X soon after Creation Lake and Kairos, I feel like we have plenty of women taking on the big themes.
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