Miguel
Let's first tackle the elephant in the room: is Biography of X sexist? Well, yes. Yes, it is. Largely in the same vein as early twentieth century science fiction tended to be overly simplistic and reductive in developing female characters, the large majority of male characters in this novel are two-dimensional hyperbolised caricatures, perfectly placed to carry the weight of blame and fault. And that's alright, I get it.
That out of the way, what Catherine Lacey does in this novel is nothing short of impressive, both in building an alternate history version of the US that some would consider too possible for comfort, and simultaneously digging through the emotional stack of a main character, exposing her strengths and weaknesses, fears and motivations, as she unravels the life's mysteries of her departed wife. Catherine does so with an elegance and simplicity of prose, and a sincerity of feeling that is uncommon in genre writing.
Biography of X aims to be a cautionary tale of geopolitical scale, but where it succeeds the most is at studying the complexity of human beings - the layers of motivation, drive, fear, hypocrisy, and fallacies that compose us; the walking, talking paradoxes that we are.
At that, it succeeds in spades.
Carolina does a superb work of illustrating mental illness from the inside in Mothtown, on an endeavour not dissimilar from Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell. I have not read it as genre-bending (as I initially expected), but a piercing, brutally honest depiction of a man's unreliably narrated descent into madness.
