Catherine Lacey’s three previous novels all deal with protagonists who, for one reason or another, can’t quite settle. They are precarious, sometimes in an economic sense but more crucially in the way they fail or refuse to resolve the messy, troublesome parts of themselves into stable, socially acceptable personalities. Often they regard themselves less as embodied minds than as vehicles filled with difficult passengers: the ‘tiny, smiling hit man’ imagined by Elly, the screenwriter protagonist of Nobody is Ever Missing (2014), as the source of her inchoate rage, or ‘the little monster in herself’ to whom Mary in The Answers (2017) attributes her feelings of guilt. Elly tries to resolve her sense of self-division by running away from her comfortable life in New York to hitchhike through New Zealand. Mary suffers from mysterious, undiagnosable pains until she tries a weird New Age therapy, which she pays for by participating in a creepy experiment exploring the neuroscience of romantic love. And then there is the compellingly vague narrator of Pew (2020), who suddenly appears in a rural, religious American community and disturbs the locals by remaining frustratingly uncategorisable as to age, sex and race. 

All of Lacey’s narrators have lost something – a sister, a relationship, a memory – and in each case the loss is accompanied by a disintegration of personal identity followed by a struggle to construct a new self out of whatever remains. Biography of X takes a more literal approach to this process of reconstruction than Lacey’s previous work, presenting itself as a biography – complete with false title page – of a polymathic New York artist known professionally by the single letter X. The book’s text is attributed to one C M Lucca, X’s widow, who claims to be writing in order to correct the record after the publication of an unauthorised biography. And so the grieving widow-turned-biographer sets out to discover the secrets of an artist who ‘layered fictions within her life’, inhabiting multiple personalities and multiple identities, all of which Biography of X documents not just in narrative form but also in a series of interpolated black-and-white photographs, which reinforce the novel’s themes of manufactured authenticity and self-fashioning.

Behind or beside this, the novel is playing another game, since its narrative unfolds in an alternative version of North America in which, following the Second World War, the South seceded, this time successfully. The ‘Great Disunion’ has prompted a tripartite division of the United States into a theocratic, authoritarian