How well can anyone really know their spouse? When an enigmatic artist – who goes by the name X – dies suddenly, her wife, CM, quickly learns how little she actually knew about the woman she had spent years with. Biography of X is CM’s metafictional attempt to write, well, a biography of X, an artist with multiple personas who’d become famous for her transgressive, controversial work. Set against the backdrop of an alternate-universe United States that’s recovering from a post-World War II schism between the North and South, the book documents CM’s journey to untangle the true history of her wife’s life by interviewing people who each knew a completely different version of her. And what she uncovers, revealed in the book’s final act, left me breathless.
"How well can anyone really know their spouse? When an enigmatic artist – who goes by the name X – dies suddenly, her wife, CM, quickly learns how little she actually knew about the woman she had spent years with. Biography of X is CM’s metafictional attempt to write, well, a biography of X, an artist with multiple personas who’d become famous for her transgressive, controversial work. Set against the backdrop of an alternate-universe United States that’s recovering from a post-World War II schism between the North and South, the book documents CM’s journey to untangle the true history of her wife’s life by interviewing people who each knew a completely different version of her. And what she uncovers, revealed in the book’s final act, left me breathless."
"The book I’ve been jabbering about to anyone who will listen is Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X , which is a tricksy, intriguing book comprising a faux biography set in a contemporary, but counterfactual United States. In it, the grieving widow of a renowned, controversial performance artist named ‘ X’— whose iconoclastic, identity-switching work echoes that of Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle, among others—attempts to piece together her wife’s mysterious origins, and in doing so offers a glimpse into a reality in which the American South seceded under a theocratic regime in the wake of the Second World War . It’s at once moving and bewildering, and terribly clever—quite extraordinary. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, now’s the moment. It’s the novel other novelists have been pressing into each others’ hands. Lorrie Moore ( Birds of America , Self-Help ) is best known for her masterful and often very funny short stories , but is also a talented novelist. Her new book I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home , billed as “a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries,” will be out in June. And Dennis Lehane ( Mystic River , Shutter Island ) returns with Small Mercies , a superior thriller set in 1970s Boston in the tense months that follow a ruling aimed at desegregating local schools . A missing white girl; a black man found dead—are these the sparks that will finally set the tinderbox alight?"
