Review by Booklist Review
Lacey's (Pew, 2020) fine novel begins on an ominous note, the death of the narrator's wife. X, an artist and writer, was enigmatic to begin with, from her one-letter name to her various and variegated shape-shifting ways. X's widow, CM, attempts to unravel the mystery behind X's life and death. Sometimes the simplest of tasks--sifting through her mail in the middle of the night--gives CM "a strange energy." She touches on the devastating ennui and lethargy often associated with the death of a loved one. She muses, "I had no idea anymore, now that she was gone, where to go or why I did anything." We learn that X refused to authorize a biography. Even so, much to CM's chagrin, a biography is published. Subsequently, CM decides to write one herself. Real-life pop cultural and political icons, from David Bowie to Bernie Sanders, pop up in X's life story, sometimes in the most surprising ways. Lacey's tale is a lovely meditation on not only the mysteries of grief and love but also the equally mysterious ways of the creative process.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lacey follows up Pew with an audacious novel of art and ideas set in an alternate late 20th century. It comprises a book titled Biography of X, which was published in 2005 by a journalist named C.M. Lucca. That book's subject, X, a pseudonymous multidisciplinary art star, reaches cult status as a novelist in 1973, when she's in her 20s (in one of many deliberately anachronistic references, X receives fan mail from a yet-to-be published Denis Johnson). Later, X travels to West Berlin to record with David Bowie, and, back in New York City, becomes a controversial performance artist. Lucca meets X in the mid-1980s, and they marry in 1990. Same-sex marriages are legal, thanks to progressive advances decades earlier pushed through by Emma Goldman, FDR's chief of staff. Goldman's agenda, though, led to a Southern secession in 1945. Shortly after the country is reunified in 1996, X dies from an unspecified cause. After an unauthorized biography of X is published, Lucca embarks on a project to set the record straight. She begins in the small Mississippi town where X was born, which X kept a secret to protect her from agents of the Southern Territory. As Lucca conducts interviews over the next several years, she begins to doubt how well she knew X after all. Lacey does a brilliant job convincing readers of Lucca's chops as a reporter, even as Lucca becomes unhinged. The author also perfectly marries her invented history with her study of a shape-shifting artist, with X refashioning herself both to escape her ultraconservative homeland and to build a vehicle for her creative expression. This is brilliant. Agent: Jin Auh, Wiley Agency. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this captivating fictional biography by Lacey (Pew), an NYPL Young Lion/Granta Best of Young American Novelists honoree, the narrator tells us that "people try to escape their past through characters." The character here is a female artist/songwriter/novelist/performer, known as X, who possessively hides her childhood history. She was also the wife of narrator Charlotte Marie (C.M.) Lucca, who is now mourning her death. In a narrative framed as alternative history, C.M. begins discovering surprising secrets about her spouse, starting with X's having come from the Southern Territories, which broke away from the United States on Thanksgiving Day, 1945. Among other deviations from history following this "Great Disunion," activist Emma Goldman starts a political party in 1946, Jackson Pollock and other nonobjective painters are killed in an act of terrorism, and there is a dramatic reversal of gender norms in the art world, with women creating the majority of artworks. With little artistic expression allowed in the Southern Territories, where citizens can be incarcerated for the slightest reason, X escapes this tyranny for New York City. There, she transforms herself many times over as she continually creates art and music with many famous people. VERDICT A tour-de-force in literary and artistic realms, this engrossing story of breakaway artist X will challenge readers on many levels.--Lisa Rohrbaugh
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A widow sets out to uncover the truth about her late wife, a mercurial artist who adopted many personas, in this audacious intellectual history of an alternate America. C.M. Lucca is a former crime reporter who resents the inaccuracies printed in the only biography of her wife, X, a famous performance artist who has recently died. Determined to correct the record, C.M. begins reporting on her wife's mysterious origins and career as a shape-shifting provocateur. "When she died, all I knew about X's distant past was that she'd arrived in New York in 1972. She never told me her birthdate or birthplace, and she never adequately explained why these things were kept secret," C.M. explains. Was X really born in the Southern Territory, a theocratic dictatorship separated from the Northern Territory for 50 years by a wall? If so, how did she escape? And how did her childhood shape the artist she was to become? C.M.'s reporting trips put her face to face with former spouses, lovers, revolutionaries, terrorists, friends, and hangers-on, but a clear picture of X remains elusive. Instead, Lacey creates a portrait of a biographer haunted by grief, struggling to untangle love from abjection, fiction from reality, art from life. "At first I had rules for researching X's life and I followed them...I have broken every rule I ever set for myself," C.M. mourns midway through the biography. "And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life." Throughout C.M.'s manuscript, Lacey includes footnotes and citations from imagined articles by real contemporary writers whose names readers well versed in cultural criticism will recognize. The effect is pleasurable and disorienting, like reading a book in a dream or surfacing a memory that's gone fuzzy around the edges. As C.M. circles closer to the truth about X, her memories about X's violent tendencies become clearer and sharper. "I did not know her, and I do not know who she was," C.M. admits at last. "I do not know anything of that woman, though I did love her--on that point I refuse to concede--and it was a maddening love and it was a ruthless love and it refuses to be contained." Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
