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