Woman of mystery: Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed

Catherine Lacey’s new book is the second literary novel I’ve read recently to radically rewrite American history. In last year’s To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara imagined a different outcome for the Civil War: the Confederate states secede to become the thoroughly racist ‘United Colonies’. Up north are several political unions, such as the ‘Free States’ (including New York), where gay marriage is not just legal but widespread by the end of the 19th century.

Lacey plants her sensational plot-twist a little later on the timeline. In Biography of X, ‘the Great Disunion’ occurs at the end of the second world war, when a wall goes up around the ‘Southern Territory’, a theocratic entity eager to protect its citizens from the purportedly communist north. The south restores the death penalty by hanging and lapidation, and polices its citizens so heavily that the birthrate drops, owing to high incarceration levels. Meanwhile, in the north, the New Deal looks rather different.