The Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

This is a disorienting and shape shifting of books. The novel is set in an America that divided into three parts in 1945—the Northern, Southern, and Western Territories. The Southern Territory has become a theocracy, divided from the Northern and Western Territories by a huge wall, which only comes down in 1996, just ten days before X’s own death. In this divided America, people we recognize appear in an uncanny fashion, out of place and weirdly different enough in politics or personality to give the world a slight sheen of confusion. Lacey reimagines Emma Goldman, the writer and anarchist who went unmentioned in most high school history texts, as one of the most pivotal figures in American politics, helping to usher in policies encouraging same-sex marriage, prison abolition, and immigrant rights before being assassinated in 1945. Ronald Reagan runs as a Green Party candidate. Bernie Sanders becomes president in 1990 after a bitter campaign against Jesse Jackson. So the alternative history component is strong, but more in the background than the foreground. X is part of the fabric of this world. She is either a genius or grifter, or both: born Caroline Luanna Walker in the Southern Territory in 1945, she escaped from the region and a traditional marriage, spending the rest of her life adopting various identities and careers, disappearing and reappearing at will. So there is a little bit of 'Groundhog Day' about it--in any case, the novel is disorienting, and for me, too much so.