FICTION
Biography of X
Catherine Lacey
Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Welcome to another America: split between a prosperous, feminist (though still sexist) north and a theocratic south isolated from the world for the past half century by a giant wall. In this country, CM Lucca, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former crime reporter, writes a biography of her wife, the eponymous “X”, who passed away in 1996.

Lucca’s biography perhaps reveals more about its biographer – and the process of writing biography, or attempting to – than it does “X”, a mysterious artist who resists the form at every turn. Having fled the isolation of the south, X engages a carousel of changing identities and noms de guerre; so much about her is either unknown or invented, nothing seems capable of being trusted. The reader is also learning about her secondhand, through Lucca’s account of her research and of her meetings with those who knew X, or claim to have known her.

The setting – and the upending – of narrative expectations begins early in American writer Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel. An author’s note informs the reader the book contains attributions “not mentioned in the text”, recalling Derrida’s deathless line about there being nothing outside it. But where does the text end, exactly? Even as a material object, this can prove a tricky question.

Biography of X contains sparring title pages (Lacey’s, followed by Lucca’s, each published by Granta, with Lucca’s copyright belonging to the year 2005), twin author biographies and a sheaf of photocopied preliminary pages, reminiscent of how the American poet Susan Howe makes visible, in her work, the formal and physical materiality of the text.

Lacey’s novel incorporates quotes and material from writers, artists and intellectuals: Susans (not only Howe but Sontag); Lacey’s familial ancestors (plus her debut novel and “favorite negative reader review” of it – “More depressing than The Bell Jar”); New York’s cultural milieu (Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Hardwick, Kathy Acker, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Richard Hell, Renata Adler, Vivian Gornick); a Kerry O’Brien interview with David Bowie; and an Age article concerning David Byrne of Talking Heads fame.

In addition to this, Biography of X includes illustrations and images: found, commissioned, created by the author, donated and received and licensed under creative commons. Indeed, the whole book, in its explicitly collaborative and bowerbird nature, constitutes a kind of creative commons.

Yet paradoxically, Biography of X is a novel that feels more fictive than one with more conventionally fictitious trappings might. Its world-building and non-fiction constructs – footnotes, photos, facsimiles of letters and other material – tend mostly to highlight the novel’s scaffolding. Which is part of the point: artifice increasing the sense of artificiality, reminding us that all art is premised on this logic.