Catherine Lacey’s Disappointing Fusion

Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel, Biography of X, which came out in 2023, is one of the most formally and intellectually interesting books of the decade so far. It’s an audacious, compelling collage of truth and invention, a story of a made-up artist that draws on bits of real artists’ lives in a biographic sense and repurposes them to fictional ends. It’s good enough to read over and over, searching for the line where reality crosses into imagination. When I learned that Lacey’s follow-up, The Möbius Book, would be a hybrid, genre-blurring text without a beginning or an end, my immediate thought was that maybe she had gotten herself on, or at least near, the level of Julio Cortázar’s canonic experimental novel Hopscotch, which can be read with its chapters in one of two suggested sequences or in any other order the reader likes.