BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

X is a fictional artist and author with a mysterious past and more pseudonyms than you can count on both hands.  Her biographer is C.M. Lucca, a journalist and X’s widow.  The backdrop is alternative history, like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.  In 1945, as imagined here, the U.S. was divided into the Southern, Northern, and Western Territories.  The Southern Territory, as you might guess, was extremely right-wing, and X was a rare escapee whose multiple identities helped her evade authorities.  Fact and fiction overlap in odd ways here, as X became friends with David Bowie, Connie Converse, and Susan Sontag, to name a few real-life notables.  Some fictional elements seem to be intentionally outrageous, with real people in different roles with different ideologies, such as the naming of Ronald Reagan as a Green Party presidential candidate.  These humorous asides don’t quite redeem this novel, though, in which Lucca seems to be so much in X’s thrall, even eight years after X’s death, as to be a bit pathetic.  She completely subjugates herself to X, even abandoning her career, which she may be resurrecting by setting the record straight about X’s history.  X is a woman beloved by many, but I didn’t find her the least bit lovable.  She’s definitely enigmatic, disappearing for weeks without explanation, expecting Lucca to carry on in her absence. Most of the remarks that Lucca quotes X as saying are completely incomprehensible and borderline nonsensical.  The photos scattered throughout are a treat, though, and this could be one of those books where it’s more fun to look at the pictures than to read it.