Title: Biography of X
Rating: 5 Stars
A famous, prickly, and notorious artist has died. A shapeshifter in the style of David Bowie, she has inhabited many identities over the years. Now known only as X, she has shielded her origins for her entire life. A writer, Theodore Smith, tells X's widow that he has done extensive research and he plans on writing X's biography. He asks to interview her. The widow indignantly refuses, knowing that X would hate any published biography.
Regardless, Smith goes ahead and publishes X's biography to great acclaim. Horrified by its inaccuracies, the widow (a Pulitzer prize winning author in her own right) decides that she will research X's life and will publish the authoritative biography. The Biography of X, by C.M. Lucca, is the result of her efforts. There is a title page, a copyright page, a photo credits page, and an author bio. There are many quotes in the book, each carefully footnoted.
All of it is fake. There is no X. There is no C.M. Lucca. The footnotes are fake. The quotes in the book are real, but were either said by different people or were said in different contexts. This is a fake biography about a nonexistent artist written by a nonexistent author.
In short, we're entering the dimension of postmodernism, and I have to confess that I was all in for it.
To make it even more interesting to a history geek like myself, the real author (Catherine Lacey) put this fake biography in a fake version of the US. In the 1940s, of all people the radical revolutionary Emma Goldman was elected President. She immediately began instituting radical changes like legalizing gay marriage. In response, in 1946, the Southern states overnight built a wall separating them from the North. They became know as the Southern Territories (ST). There was also the Northern Territories (NT) and the Western Territories (WT).
This ushered in a US cold war between the NT and the ST. While the NT continued its progressive and scientific advances, the ST relapsed into an extreme authoritarian theocracy. Over a period of decades, the backward tendencies in the ST led to severe economic declines. Lack of scientific knowledge led to lower crop yields that threatened starvation. In 1996, fifty years after the wall went up, the NT and the ST uneasily reunited.
X lived literally the lifespan of the wall, from 1946 to 1996. Her widow, Lucca, is writing in 2005 and having to navigate the uneasy tensions that still exist between the two territories despite being ostensibly unified.
Much to Lucca's shock, she discovers that X was actually born in the oppressive ST. Not only that, but she was married with a child, living a very traditional life. Somehow she found her way to a librarian that showed her banned, radical books. This led her to join a revolutionary group dedicated to overthrowing the ST regime.
Planning to blow up a rifle factory, the group, consisting of, among other people, Kathy Boudin and Terry Robbins, accidentally set the bomb off early. Terry Robbins is blown to pieces while Boudin and X have to go on the run to escape capture and immediate execution.
Right there, if you know your history, alarm bells are going off. Kathy Boudin and Terry Robbins were both members of the revolutionary group The Weathermen. Infamously, in Greenwich Village, the bomb that Robbins was working on exploded, blowing him to bits. Boudin immediately went underground to evade capture.
This is something that happens regularly throughout this novel. Lacey takes historical events and contorts them to fit them into her alternative history. Again, as a history geek, I found this endlessly fascinating. She describes how the US narrowly avoided a Vietnam War. There is an assassination in the novel that mimics how Kim Jong Un's half brother was killed in an airport in Malaysia.
Since this is a biography of an artist, it would only make sense that significant (and less significant) real artists are characters strewn throughout the entire novel. Since X worked in music, literature, performance art, and other artistic media, a wide range of artists are incorporated into this work. In fact, if you were even a semi noted highbrow intellectual artist working in the 1970s and the 1980s, I would think that you'd be offended if you didn't make an appearance here.
In these pages are quotes and stories from such celebrity artists as David Bowie, Renata Adler, and Tom Waits. X turns down Warren Beatty's advances. Many of the stories are about artists that are obscure now but were probably obscure even back then when they were active. Much of the fun of this novel was coming across a name and wondering if they were real. I'd trundle off to Wikipedia and, sure enough, there'd be an entry for them. Their life described in the pages of the novel would be slightly askew but still recognizable. Connie Converse was a singer / songwriter that had an intimate relationship with X. In real life, she was a singer / songwriter (her music is available to stream) that disappeared in 1974 when she turned 50, never to be seen again. Ross McElwee is an American filmmaker specializing in biography. In the novel, he creates a groundbreaking film about X. The list of artists making an appearance goes on and on.
Lacey goes to some lengths to make the biography as real as possible. Photos are intermixed throughout the pages. Some are photos of real people. Others are photos of X. Lucca has found multiple photos of X across her entire life, from childhood through her many identities. Conveniently enough, the photos are always darkened or slightly blurred. You can never tell exactly what you're looking at.
As I've mentioned, X has multiple identities. There is Bee Converse, who was intimate with Connie Converse and worked with the likes of Bowie and Waits. There is Cindy O, who wrote an important trilogy of novels. There is Dorothy Eagle, the identity that she assumed when she finally managed to escape the ST and end up in the Western Territory of Montana. There is the artist Vera. There is another persona named Yarrow Hall who abducted Vera and forced her to pose. These (and others), are all manifestations of X.
As Lucca digs deeper, she enters a labyrinth where she no longer knows what's real. At one point, Lucca and X are being persistently followed by stalkers. Lucca is terrified of their potential for violence but X seems strangely unaffected. It later turns out that X might have hired the stalkers to follow them as part of an art project.
By the end, Lucca is no longer convinced that her years with X were authentic. Could it be that the life that she was living was just one more art installation in X's mind?
As the reader, Lucca's paranoia becomes contagious. It turns out that Lucca herself has gone by multiple names. She admits that her family has a history of schizophrenia. In her author photo, she wears large sunglasses and a hood and scarf that obscures her, much like the other pictures of X in the book.
Is Lucca X? Is X Lucca? Lucca describes events, galas, cocktail parties, and openings where the two of them appeared together in public. In the book, she interviews people who knew both of them.
Still, I can't help but wonder. Do we have a Tyler Durden situation here?
So yeah, in case you couldn't tell, I really loved this book. Any book that has a robust and feasible alternate US history mixed in with a hall of mirrors of identity confusion is aces with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment