Lighting out for the Territories
Re Catherine Lacey "The Biography of X"
Catherine Lacey, The Biography of X (2023) - I bumped The Biography of X up my to-read list after I had a look at the book’s goodreads page and saw an interesting genre of review. This novel, featured on a lot of critical best-of lists when it came out in 2023, left some goodreaders hard done by: they expected quality fiction about grief, sapphic love, and artistic life, but they got… alternate history! Well, I am interested both in “quality fiction” (and how readers interact with it) and in alternative history fiction. So, I thought when I saw those disappointed three, two, and one star reviews, this I have to read.
Biography of X is indeed a work of quality fiction, both in the sense that it fits well within the standards of “literary” fiction (unless we restrict the category so tightly that any speculative elements disqualify a book), and in terms of being a good book, a great book even. And it is, by any definition, an alternative history novel: it takes place in a world where history went quite differently, and the frame this alternate timeline provides is essential to the book. Catherine Lacey even got into character as the narrator/putative author of the biography/memoirs we are reading, sending out publishing notices in the name of “CM Lucca” and alluding to the career of X as though she were real. And in order to make X real, Lacey had to (chose to?) descend to the basement, where nerds like Harry Turtledove, SM Stirling, Terry Bisson, and, well, me play our dank games. “One of us! One of us!” I chant nasally in greeting.
Lacey, of course, isn’t the only literary writer who has used alternate history. It seems that the alternate-timeline framing has been more popular in the last thirty years than any time previously (shades of Walter Benn Michaels’ argument about neoliberal literature looking backwards…)- see its use by Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, etc. Maybe the irate readers in goodreads are just ignorant of that background when they decry counterfactuals in their nice quality fiction- it’d hardly be the first off-base complaint on there.
But I think there’s something else going on there. The three authors I mention use alternate history schema to illustrate fairly straightforward points about their (shared) country and (various) ethnicities, using changes in history to make points about being Jewish or Black, as the case may be, American. For the book club habitue, used to getting their ideas spoon fed to them, didacticism can excuse experiment. Whitehead, in Underground Railroad, distends realism far more than Lacey does, but American liberals are used to getting their perspective on race in fable form (note- I actually don’t think Underground Railroad, The Plot Against America, or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union are all that didactic, except insofar as Roth was using a didactic-old-man voice for effect, but let’s just say the “reception history” leans instructional).
In theory, Biography of X could fall into that same didactic category, using a distention of history to shed light on the experience of women, especially queer women. The narrator tells us the story of trying to tell the story of her wife, who went by several names but was best known as X. X was a big time artist in the fields of film, literature, performance art, “installations,” etc. X didn’t want to be biographized, the narrator explains, but a lame (male) hack rushed a biography into print anyway, and so the narrator has to use her journalism chops to set the record straight. This quest gets more and more complicated as it goes on, because establishing even basic facts of X’s life, like her place of birth, involves trying to sort of layers of obfuscation, laid down by many people but mostly by X herself, made necessary in part by the facts of life in the world of the novel.
In an interview with the Chicago Review of Books, Lacey says one of the reasons she made this book an alternative history story is that she wanted to write a book about a lesbian relationship in America where oppression, at least on the basis of sexuality, doesn’t drive the plot. And it doesn’t. The action of the novel is, indeed, driven by CM discovering who X was, what their relationship was. But we face a complication: the fundamental idea X wanted to get across, it seems, is that identity is a fiction and that she could, should, and would adopt multiple identities, not out of mental pathology but because she was an artist and she wanted to. CM is committing a sort of infidelity to X by writing what she does- X wanted no biography, and only correcting the jerk dude provides some justification to CM at the outset (we later find out that X was no stranger to infidelity herself). So far, so “literary” - but harder to render didactic.
The first thing CM wants to dish her enemy biographer on is X’s site of birth, and that’s where the intersection with Lacey’s alternate timeline comes in. X was born deep within the Southern Territory. In some fictional settings involving travel between alternate historical timelines, the time-cops (or whoever) give the timelines they move between pithy little names. In keeping, we might call the world Lacey makes here “Goldman,” because the great anarchist revolutionary is the pivotal figure behind making an America where gay marriage an accepted reality by the 1980s (when X and DeLucca marry)... at least in the Northern Territory, because the South followed a reactionary backlash to Goldman-inspired social reforms into de facto secession in the 1940s. The North proceeds along liberal, vaguely social-democratic lines, somewhat like Nordic social democracy. The Western Territories try out some libertarian thing or another. The Southern Territories become a weird Protestant totalitarian state, impoverished and isolated, shades of Handmaid’s Tale but more than that North Korea and East Germany. By the time the novel takes place, a difficult reunion between the fractions of the country is in progress.
The Southern Territory is weird, even as it's reforming and rejoining the libbed-up North. X did terrorism down there, as a young woman, against the theocratic regime! She was involved in a sort of backwards version of the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, where members of the Weather Underground scored an own-goal (to use the ghastly but appropriate British term for a bomber accidentally killing themselves with their own bomb) with a bomb they meant to use on an officer’s dance at a New Jersey army base, to supposedly strike a blow against the American war machine then destroying Vietnam. Lacey made the choice to name some of X’s comrades after people from the actual, historical New Left- Ted Gold, the alleged bombmaker in that WU group, Kathy Boudin, who eventually went down for an armored truck robbery. Neither were from the South, historically- both were Jews, born and raised in New York, to parents also from New York, etc. So- it’s a choice, as they say.
Lacey doesn’t just do this with the anti-theocracy bombers X found herself amongst (faked her death amongst- there’s a theory that that townhouse bomb went off on purpose, just not WU’s purposes, could Lacey be implying X had a more sinister role there, as part of her escape plan?). We see names throughout the work of h numerous writers, artists, etc., born well after the history changed, depicted as sources for interviews, books, documentaries et al that CM uses in her writing (there’s a lot of both footnotes and endnotes here!). They’re mostly, for lack of a more precise term, NPR types (indeed, Northern Public Radio comes up as a source). A curious set of people to dredge across timelines!
I wonder about this. If Harry Turtledove implied that the people bombing something in his fictional timeline where the south secedes were the same running around doing revolutionary violence in our 1960s (and he wouldn’t be above it), I’d roll my eyes. It’d be cheesy and show a disrespect for historical causality, playing with which in a believable and interesting way is the point of his books. Well, Lacey is a much better writer in more or less every way than Turtledove. So, I’d give her a more charitable reading, even if I thought it was just lazy cheap heat motivating her less plausible anachronisms.
For what it’s worth, my own playing around with alternate timelines, I try to keep to rules, like that people born anytime after a few years past the point of departure from our timeline (the PoD as they used to call it on the forums) don’t show up. I’m a historian, so I know there’s too much to know, and too much we don’t know, to try to do alternate history timelines really “rigorously,” that you have to pick and choose which aspects of causality to bend and which to reenforce in order to create an effect. As a reader, I know the best examples of alternate history fiction, while usually hewing to some standards of consistency, put the fiction first. And as someone with some dim awareness of the differences in literary subcultures, I’m pretty well convinced that Catherine Lacey probably doesn’t give a shit, certainly not in the same sense I do. And I think if so, she was right not to. If anything, thinking about what Lacey was doing, recontextualizing dead twenty-two year old longhairs and the voices she likely hears in her headphones on her commute the way she did, is still more interesting than most questions contemporary literary fiction impels me to ask.
Anyway! CM follows the story of X, who, post-faked-death, made her way to New York. She’s both a compelling character and a pastiche constructed from various women in the recent(ish) history of art - a little Cindy Sherman, a little Eve Sedgwick, a little Susan Sontag, a lot of Kathy Acker, or maybe I just see more Acker because I know her work relatively well, as far as cool New York artsy types go (Acker also shows up a few times in X’s life as a sort of friend/rival). X has Acker’s insouciance, her challenge to conventions of identity, her reputation for being oversexed, the way “everyone” (i.e., people in the arts and a few celebrities) knew her, the whole “transgressive artist (woman)” deal from the late twentieth century. I might be in a unique position to receive these parts of the book. I know a fair amount about the “downtown scene” from circa 1972-2002… but only out of historical interest. I don’t especially like much of what they did- Acker, for instance, I could take or leave, and find her erudition more impressive than her art (she knew her stuff!). In conversation about the works of art produced on the scene, with people who actually value them for what they are, I’d have little to contribute. I actually do relate to some of the nostalgia around art scenes of yore, especially the nostalgia for a different kind of urban social space, one that hadn’t advanced quite so far down the gullet of capital… Anyway, the patterns cast by what I know and what I don’t “get” made for a compelling prism to read this book through.
Lacey isn’t in the business of providing easy answers. X’s countercultural puckishness finds its counterpart in controlling and dishonest behavior, to degrees CM thought impossible before she followed up the trails her dead wife left for her to find. It really is, along with whatever else, an arresting story of discovery and grief, of what some of these conceptions of the artistic life can cost.
Speaking as a historian and person who’s thought a lot about alternate history, there’s a few more tidbits I found myself going over, and Lacey doesn’t give easy answers for those either… to equally good effect. At one point, a fascist party is elected to power in the Northern Territory… and then is voted out, and is a source less of panic and more of distaste for CM and her queer friends. Does “fascist” mean the same thing in Goldman? Does the way fascism seems to be less disastrous have something to do with how WWII went, or ended- all we know is that it happened, and that in 1945 the Southern Territories split off. Shit, how much is Illinois Governor and FDR’s chief of staff Emma Goldman really the Emma Goldman, anarchist, we know? I appreciate the ways in which Lacey uses the negative space inevitable in any telling of alternate history – or, you know, regular history, any story, really – in this story.
This is before even getting into race in both Goldman and in The Biography of X. This is mostly a story of white people. Black people enter into it from the outside, generally as people not interested in the white nonsense of artsy jerks, with art of their own to do that comes up at times in the text. The Southern Territory is still segregated, but arguably less ferocious about it than during the downfall of Jim Crow in OTL. Some black communities there even formed Christian-Anarchist communes that the Southern police state hasn’t bothered to destroy, etc. This seems to me to be the most respectful way Lacey could find to give Black America its due, in this story where she used a national-historical canvas to tell a story about white artsy people.
Is Lacey trying to raise questions like the ones I discuss in the prior two paragraphs, or are they just artifacts of my nerd/pedant attentions going up against an artist’s framing convention? Well, Lacey’s not the only one who sees the tension between curiosity and respect for the necessary obscurity of the artistic process. Among other things, you don’t get a lot of alternate history fiction – in either the Scifi/Fantasy shelves or the ones marked Literature – that focuses this much attention on cultural and art history. The standard althist bestsellers of my youth were all about war and politics, usually banal approaches to both. More or less, so are the better works, in their historical element anyway – the key changes take place on battlefields and in governing institutions – whatever else they were saying about the human condition. I called X a pastiche of elements borrowed from other figures in the history of art. Well, alternate history is necessarily pastiche, in much the same way. In one of the grand traditions of American letters, Lacey uses materials associated with lowly genre fiction to fine effect in the quarters of “quality fiction…” and, I think, honors the counterfactual exercise, too, in her own way, whether that was her plan or not.
Mithra’s favorite alternate histories involve her namesake winning out over pale imitation gods…
