This Novelist Is Pushing All the Buttons at the Same Time

M

y favorite work by the artist X, An Account of My Abduction, depicts a kidnapping. For part of the 87-minute video, a woman lies taped up on the floor, writhing, while a voice off camera hisses threats at her. The woman on the floor is named Věra. The one off camera is named Yarrow Hall. The video is disturbing for multiple reasons. It captures suffering and vulnerability. It presents brutality as art. And both of the women are actually characters inhabited by X. The abduction is staged, performed, fabricated, whatever word you prefer. But its first viewers didn’t know what they were looking at, or whether it was real or invented. And once they realized it was the latter, they were confused by what felt like deception—a reaction that seems to have been the point.

I’ve never actually seen An Account of My Abduction. No one has, or will. But you can “view” it yourself in Catherine Lacey’s genre-quaking new novel, Biography of X, which invents X, and her assumed identities, and her big, brash, occasionally stunty body of work. X is a creation in the vein of David Bowie and Kathy Acker and Cindy Sherman and Andrea Fraser—a shape-shifter who encourages her fictional selves to metastasize until they kick her out of her own life, an iconoclast with many noms de plume but no answers about her own childhood or upbringing. “It only seems to be a simple question—Where are you from? It can never be sufficiently answered,” she enigmatically tells a magazine interviewer, posing the question that animates every inch of Biography of X.