In an interview, the avant-garde artist known as X says, “I do not always believe it is morally wrong to act in a cruel manner, so long as you accept the burden of accurately calculating whether the object of one’s cruelty could stand to benefit from pain more than from pleasure.” The statement seems to encapsulate the modus operandi of this subject of the fictional “biography” written by her fictional widow, CM Lucca.
Lacey is the author of four previous books that often explore identity, such as the wonderful Pew, about a person of no specific race or gender who appears in a small religious community. Interestingly, Lacey’s 2014 debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, is about a young woman who leaves her marriage and takes a one-way trip to New Zealand (because you can’t go any further away than that), asking, “If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?”
Biography of X begins after X’s death in 1996 with a widow grieving the loss of the woman she loved and venerated. Spurred on by an unauthorised biography, Lucca decides to research her wife’s origins, as X never shared anything about her past, and in fact would shut down any line of enquiry she didn’t like.
A picture emerges of a brilliant though controlling artist who was prone to disappearing at will.
“It is no secret that my wife layered fictions within her life as a kind of performance, or, at times, a shield.” For these identities may have arisen from an attempt to evade assassination: X’s past was politically dangerous.
Structured around the various characters that Lucca interviews, the novel presents a strangely familiar divided America. The majority of the South seceded in 1945, establishing a patriarchal theocracy to become the Southern Territory – a place where stoning was lawful and “birth houses” aimed to increase the birth rate.
This is relevant not so much because we’re going down a Margaret Atwood-inspired dystopian rabbit hole, but because it’s where X originally came from and, as Lucca comes to realise, this upbringing informs much of X’s artwork.
When X is part of a botched revolutionary explosion, she escapes across the border into the Northern Territory.
And so, over a period of 10 years, X creates numerous identities that contribute to her seminal installation, The Human Subject. X goes on to become an art celebrity.
She makes music with David Bowie in late-70s Berlin, and hangs out with Tom Waits. Queues form to visit her installations. In a funny, circular bit of navel-gazing, X makes an artwork about the stalkers who have been following her and Lucca, hiring private investigators to stalk the stalkers. It all feels a bit Andy Warhol or Banksy.
What keeps the momentum and interest going in this novel isn’t so much the increasingly narcissistic character of X but the narrator, CM Lucca – the intensity of her grief, the intensity of her love for X, the revelations (or lack) of the sometimes teeth-grittingly awful discoveries about her wife’s past.
It’s a book that actually says a lot about love and art, and explores the idea of a “genius” artist who doesn’t feel beholden to normal expectations of behaviour.
Is it all right for an artist to be cruel because they are brilliant? Is it okay to control one’s wife to the point of subjugation because of apparent genius? Or, at the end of the day, is it all simply fake anyway?
It is up to Lucca to discover these things (for us, the reader, and for herself, the fictional author), and it’s heartbreaking when she reaches the centre of the maze that was X.
