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That appraisal, were told, was printed in a previous biography of the artist.
Through her speak Susan Sontag, Cy Twombly, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, to name just a few.
Instead, she has put together a real-seeming account of a fake artist.
Xs wife, C. M. Lucca, is the biographer which is to say Laceys narrator.
Despite this, or because of it, she was unquestioningly devoted to the artist.
X, meanwhile, was proud, petty, often cold (especially toward C.M.
), and remarkable to almost everyone who knew her from Byrne on down.
out of the worst of her grief.
It barely punctures the surface of the artists life.
I did not know that by beginning this research I had doomed myself in a thousand ways, C.M.
X was an exception.
Its a dizzying reorientation for a novel that initially seems to be about the art world.
In the North, same-sex marriage has long been legal and prisons are nearly abolished.
For all the detail, though, parts of her alternate America feel underrealized.
But those ideas arent given much narrative priority here.
The side-stepping continues later.
Describing Xs support of a collective of Black artists, C.M.
She hangs out with Tom Waits at Electric Lady Studios.
She goes to West Berlin with David Bowie.
Is this a joke?
The chapters in which C.M.
These sections are impressively populated, but, like a real biography, they can start to feel dutiful.
But Lacey herself is brilliant.
The same could be said of us.
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