Words and whiskey

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Back when I regularly haunted bars, usually dive bars and usually alone, I would carry along some kind of reading material, a newspaper or, in a burst of middlebrow bravado, a New Yorker magazine. Something less intense and more foldable than an actual book.

Knowing that poring over prose looked odd in a place of revelers, pool pushers and loud music, I tried my best to be inconspicuous, settling down at the end of the bar, bathed in the neon splash of beer signage, or at a far-off table near the bathrooms, where the perfume of urinal cakes and dollar-store Glade lent a dubious olfactory ambiance.  

Reading in public is acceptable in cafes and airports, but in bars it seems to be a pretentious faux pas, some sort of performative act. It could be a sly “pick-me-up” gesture, a “dating hack,” as LitHub recently put it. 

That never occurred to me. A woman reading alone in a bar might be misconstrued as a come-on, but as a guy reading the police blotter in the paper, that was hardly the case. I simply wanted a whiskey with my words, then get out of there. At times I felt like a noir character — bruised alienation with a newspaper under his arm, trench coat optional.

Only once did someone mock me for reading in a bar, an annoying professional acquaintance who wanted me to join him at his table to gab. He teased me for reading a magazine, as if I was showing off, when really I was blissfully absorbed in my own inky world and couldn’t care less what anyone thought (proof: I was drinking Miller Lite).

I was having none of it and, in more polite terms than these, I told him to buzz off and leave me the goddam hell alone, that I’d rather read a mediocre Shouts & Murmurs than have to fake my way through vapid conversation and be as social as a mannequin.

In general, most good bars are too dark for reading, like Club De Ville in Austin, although the late Longbranch Inn, also in Austin, was ideal, especially on slow weeknights. The lights were strong but not glaring and you could always find a good half-hidden spot at the massive wood-carved bar, which looked like the bow of an ancient ship encircled by mermaids.

One of my favorite reading bars is the gloriously art deco Vesuvío Cafe in San Francisco, which shares Beat Generation bona fides with legendary bookstore City Lights, right next door. Have a drink, stroll on over, browse the shelves, buy a book, go back to the bar and read. In that case, a book in the bar couldn’t be more fitting. (Just don’t get Ginsberg’s “Howl.” That’s a little too on the nose.)

I’ve also written in bars, a lot. That’s when I’m traveling abroad. After a long day, I crack open a moleskin notebook and record the day’s doings, the contact info of people I’ve met, and attempt the occasional pen and ink sketch, which are invariably doomed to violent preschool abstractions. I draw as well as I play the tuba.

Bars are unique reading arenas. Bars are special. They’re where you unwind with a funny movie review by Anthony Lane or a lyrical music profile by Michael Corcoran while sipping a cold one. It beats sitting on your sofa doing the same. For bars are communal. You’re around people, and that might just afford a whisper of hope. 

Maybe I look dopey sitting at the bar, alone, nose in a periodical. But believe me, I am rapt and content. Content as could be.  

Not me. I don’t have a beard or such a suave sweater. Also, I think he’s Spanish.

Pet peeves

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Between the cat eating the house plants then vomiting greenery all over the place and the dog expressing his anal glands by scooting his butthole across the cream-colored carpet, the animals are just asking for a one-way trip to the pound. 

I jest, but it’s true that pets is only one letter away from pests. Love them as I do, these free-roaming (if housebound) creatures are high-maintenance, not quite like human children, god forbid, but demanding and nerve-wracking nonetheless.

Oh, what’s this adorable chunk of indescribable disgustingness? Just another hairball upchucked from my favorite feline. Thanks, Tiger Lily, you charmer!

Any responsible owner of pets knows the aggravation of keeping animals. That’s why I’ve owned so many pet rats over the years — low-maintenance while being cleaner than cats and smarter than dogs. That’s a truism that happens to hold water. And the rodents may just be funnier than cats and dogs, and more affectionate to boot. Plus they have a life-span a little longer than the common house fly, which actually drop-kicks your heart.

Rats always like to play and snuffle around. They are great explorers, endlessly curious and insatiably social. They hoard. They drink beer. They dig in the plants, climb all over you, squeak during belly rubs and, yes, even giggle with joy. Then again, they nibble anything in their path, from electrical cords to your favorite book.

Pets aren’t perfect. People aren’t perfect. And while my girlfriend isn’t going to express her anal glands on my light-hued carpet, she might dog-ear the pages and break the binding of my favorite book. Infallibility — let the Pope bask in that rarefied delusion.

So as I write about these pet peeves, the dog goes ballistic over the arrival of the mail. Screeches and door scratches, head nearly exploding with the notion of territorial intrusion. The dog is bored. Let him fulfill a sense of purpose for 20 seconds. Though, thanks to the hyperactive scratching, the front door needs a fresh paint job.

The dog, Cubby, grumbles as he comes off his hissy-fit. He relaxes, peers out the window for more invaders, then curls up in a ball like a sowbug on the couch. (He’s dark gray, charcoal, and small. Like a sowbug.) The cat … who knows where she went. She vanishes like the Cheshire Cat, but leaving no toothy smile in her wake. How come cats rarely smile? Entitled, they are, seething with grave self-importance.

Last week the dog shat on the dining room rug, an impressive tower of leaning Lincoln Logs, a bonfire yet unlit. The cat barfed out something bile-colored — an intoxicating shade of yellow, beige and lime green — and I, ha ha, got to pick it all up. Rascals!

The price of pets is worth it. They cost time, money and exasperation. They get sick. The dog needs grooming. The cat tears up the carpet. Then there are the Sea-Monkeys, which live in a miniature saltwater tank. Let’s not get into the Sea-Monkeys.

Pets are gems. Strange animals strolling the halls, licking themselves obsessively, barking and meowing the call of the wild, oozing reciprocal love in our gorgeous, fantastically maddening peaceable kingdom. Sit, Cubby, sit. Thatta boy. 

The cat’s seething self-importance

Nature calls. Take a message.

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

As I read about Chile — the country that curls like a tongue down the Pacific coast of South America — it seems more and more to be a platonic ideal for naturists, hikers and outdoorsies. Mountains, snow, rapids, ocean, flora, fauna, all doused in a magenta sunset glow that shouts once in a lifetime experiences — that’s what I see. Alpacas! Elephant seals! Avian abundance! Maybe a merman, or a yeti! The whole thing is almost mythological in its exotic, boot-trekking glories. Binoculars mandatory.

Here’s the thing: I’m not going to Chile to hike or ski or bird watch or scale anything that’s not human-made or shaped like stairs. Or, for that matter, anything that doesn’t have numbered buttons in a metal box with sliding doors. 

More than 12 minutes of hiking reduces me to a gasping heap of implacable boredom. Snow skiing I absolutely adore, but I haven’t done it in eons and I’m afraid at this late date I’d put on my skies and immediately crash into a tree, snap untold bones and forever reside in a wheelchair, speaking with a keyboard and a pencil between my teeth. 

During my Southern California childhood, I was a fiend for the forest, creeks, lakes, waterfalls, trails and, of course, the crashing chaos of the ocean and its silken beaches. We’d roll up our Toughskins and splash in pools looking for frogs and pollywogs, snakes and lizards. We always got poison ivy, always. Beyond the Santa Barbara area, we made Yosemite and Sequoia national parks paradises of youthful plunder. It was majestic.

Today, my idea of a jaunt in the wilderness is a day trip to the countryside — like a  winery. That sounds pitifully fuddy-duddy, but I counter that impression with my love of the ricketiest rollercoasters, the loudest Metallica, a good late-night tipple, hip sneakers and an innate aversion to Adele and Hootie and the Blowfish.

What I’m saying is that I have approximately zero nature planned for my approaching trip to Chile. For one, it will be winter when I go in June and I’m not packing boots or a beanie, and I am defiantly indifferent to spotting penguins in their natural habitat. A winery or three will be the gist of my wild country safari.

That’s not to say Chile’s outdoor offerings aren’t uniquely attractive. Glossing my guide book, I note three regions that more than tempt this tent-resistant traveler: 

“Norte Chico: Beaches, Stargazing and Verdant Valleys”

“Sur Chico: Ominous Volcanoes, Pristine Waterways and Outdoor Adventures”

“Northern Patagonia: Mountains, Rivers, Glaciers and Fjords”

Wait. Maybe I …

No. 

I am an urban creature, a pavement pounder, a museum roamer, a wannabe epicure, a streetwise wiseacre — whatever. I simply don’t like rocks in my shoes, rattlesnakes or hauling a backpack the size of a Kia up craggy hills.

Take me to Tokyo for the wild nights and neon sizzle. Paris for the boulevards and bouillabaisse. New York for the noise and neurotic hustle. Istanbul, Madrid, Berlin, Montreal, San Francisco … In none of those cities do I need a walking stick or a can of Off!

I’m headed to Santiago, Chile’s capital, a metropolis of turbulent colonial and Pinochet-era histories, creative hives of Nobel poet Pablo Neruda, a patchwork of neoclassical, art deco and neo-gothic architecture, museums, grand parks and hills and the rushing Mapocho River, all backdropped by the Andes Mountains. 

I’ll take day trips to the aforementioned wineries, as well as to Valparaiso Port and Viña del Mar, which provide access to the countryside, coastline and beaches, about as nature-y as I’ll get. (No, I don’t own flip-flops or sandals.)

With a population of seven million people, making it one of the largest cities in the Americas, Santiago promises a breadth of urban sensations. Really, who needs the sanity of the great outdoors when you’ve got dinner reservations at a downtown restaurant called Dementia?

Recent tomes I’ve tapped

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I’m never not reading a book or two. These are a few new titles I got my grubby paws on: 

Mike Nichols’ 1966 film of Edward Albee’s corrosive play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” remains a dish-rattling, drink-spilling, daggers-in-your-ears delight, all marital earthquakes and social Molotov cocktails. (Cocktails. Of course.) Booze is big in that cracked portrait of a long-wed couple on the rocks. (On the rocks. Of course.) And you get a contact high reading the riveting “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” by Philip Gefter, who capably captures the play’s serrated edges, dubious morality and verbal drive-bys, as well as the behind-the-scenes hoopla of making a controversial movie with a controversial couple, no less than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor — Hollywood nitroglycerin. It’s a bracing blast of theater and cinema history.  

“Headshot” is by a woman named Rita Bullwinkel. Let’s get that out of the way. (There, done.) This slim, tightly coiled novel is also a muscular debut, damp with the blood and sweat of a passel of female teenage boxers, zesty characters realized with pointillist panache. Time-leaping and fragmentary, the girls’ stories are told in intense vignettes for a scrappy scrapbook of pugilistic profiles that pounds with humanity and life. If not quite a K.O. — more tonal and rhythmic variety would shake things up — the book is a fleet-footed contender. 

With irksomely precocious flair — at 35, he’s a wizardly wunderkind — poet Kaveh Akbar conjures worlds of art and ideas in his radiant fiction debut “Martyr!” Reeking agreeably of auto-fiction, this dense but delectably readable novel is about an Iranian-American poet scouring past and present, life, death and love with the insight of an artist and the squishy heart of the wounded. Gorgeous language propels you through its lush, gently philosophical thickets. And despite some muddled mysticism near the end — I’m allergic to spiritual allegory — “Martyr!” had me pleasantly reeling. 

Lorrie Moore’s a personal favorite and her latest fiction is the knottily named “I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home.” Like all her books, tangy prose festoons the pages (a bite-size sample: “Fluorescent light rinsed the room.”). Yet the novel, with its arch surreal touches, rubbed me wrong. The narrative, centered on a man and his dying brother, is gawky, with sharp elbows and knobby knees. Plus, there’s heaps about chemo, cancer and croaking, and I’m not in a hospice mood. The novel just won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, so call me bonkers. In this rare instance, Moore is less.

Not for the feint of heart but perhaps for suckers for sentiment, the bleak memoir “Molly” — breathlessly written by Molly’s husband, Blake Butler, a noted novelist of thrillers — starts with her gunshot suicide and continues with another bang, the crack of bared emotion and tell-all candor. This is the story of Butler and Molly Brodak’s three-year marriage, a melding of art and nature and words and, in her case, bouts of inconsolable darkness. Brodak, a published poet and author who said “I simply wasn’t good enough,” killed herself three weeks before her 40th birthday, in 2020. “Molly” is so much about her and her devastating secrets, yet equally about Butler’s clawing to the other side of grief through deep (and verbose) psychic excavation. He includes Molly’s suicide note (“I don’t love people. I don’t want to be a person”), along with the frantic blow-by-blow action of finding her body in a favorite field of theirs. These passages are tough-going, not only for the forensic particulars, but for Butler’s writerly histrionics as well; he pants on the page. A cult sensation, tugging readers to and fro like emotional taffy and kicking critics into superlative overdrive, “Molly” is a divisive read, by turns lovely, wincing and overheated. It is the first book I’ve read that opens with the phone number for the national suicide hotline. 

Sole asylum

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

So we’re wandering through the smashing Henry Taylor exhibit at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan and, like that, flash-bam, my right foot spontaneously combusts. It burns and sizzles. I seize up and sit down like a premature geriatric. Wincing happens. Cursing occurs. And yet nothing diminishes the pleasures of the show one bit. The art is exquisite — raw, funny, moving. I’m between awe and ow.

The foot becomes an issue. The pain, the throb, the burn. And we still have miles to trek through the unforgiving corridors of the city. The day is young, and it is often excruciating.

A day later, I call the podiatrist. An X-ray of my right foot is taken. I wait in the doctor’s minute room, slouching on the elevated exam bench, whose thin tissue covering crunches at the tiniest move, like aluminum foil, or tracing paper.

The doctor at last enters, assistant in tow, and she asks me to denude the offending foot. As I peel off my sock, I intone dramatically, “Behold the monstrosity.”

She laughs. I was expecting a scream. My foot is an objectively ghoulish sight. 

Pro that she is, the doc instantly unriddles what’s before us, which is, in all its homeliness, sort of poignant. It’s something Cubist, maybe Surrealist. Perhaps a strain of elephantiasis.

What’s really happening is a honking medley of maladies: a bunion, a hammertoe and a flat foot. Hearing this, blinking dumbly, I inquire about a wholesale foot replacement, say, a grocery cart wheel, or a deer hoof.

Ignoring me, she administers a very gnarly cortisone shot into my toe while her assistant sprays a freezing liquid on the entry area so I don’t shriek like Axl Rose. The needle goes in deep. And deeper. I swear I hear the crunch of bone. A choir of angels sings.

Amazingly, my foot feels instantly better. The burn is extinguished. The doctor cautions that the cortisone could last a week, two months, forever, we don’t know. I’ll take any of those. She has me order an $11 toe splint from Amazon and suggests I buy fancy insoles. She checks to see if my insurance will cover the insoles she can provide, at $450, but, no, of course not. They will not foot the bill.

I sort of hobble out of the podiatrist’s office. My foot feels so much better. I’m walking on air. I’m about to do a little jig, until, out in the sunshine, I realize what a heel I’d be. One step at a time. One step at a time.

Eerie and incandescent, my X-rayed foot, a web of symptoms.

Travel burnout? Ah, grow up

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Fanned out before me are four travel books about Chile, my next destination — if, that is, I can get over a bruising bout of traveler’s fatigue. 

We should all be so fatigued. A first-world ailment if ever there was one, this is a disorder of the chronic whiner, that big burbling inner baby who’s pooped pulling his roller carry-on through oh-so-crowded airports and having to locate the gate for his flight. Poor little travel boy!

Fortunately these are library books.

Writing the above was cathartic. It puts matters in perspective and places my pathetic buffoonery, my puerile moaning, in high relief. I’m not suffering chronic traveler’s fatigue, wherein I actually can’t pack my bags and go. This isn’t a medical issue. This is an earth-rattling brain fart.

I know the drill. For one, I’m quite agile negotiating the human/zombie slalom course of international airports. And while getting to one’s destination may be maddening, once you’re there — be it Chile, San Francisco or Naples —  the steady delights begin to flow. (Theoretically. Technically. So they say.)

Perhaps I’m not really fatigued after all. Yet I am definitely a little worn-out from the jostling logistics of multiple back-to-back trips: the sleepless nine-hour redeye flights, the four-hour layovers, and the sleepless 12-hour redeye trains. (“Sleeper Car,” with the clanging rickety-rack all night? Refund!) 

Not to mention the extortionately priced airport food (much of it prison-grade), snaking airport security lines, and the endless stop-go choreography of the Uber circuit. Yet, as frustrating as they can be, the Uberthons are worth it.

As are other tricks of the trade. I’ve started to pay for small conveniences, like “priority” seating on United (around $40 a flight) and, better, $78 for five years of TSA PreCheck, which zips you through security, sort of like the 15 items or less line at the grocery store.

But lately, after crammed-together trips to Budapest, Poland, Sicily and Washington, DC, I thought: This is enough. Too much, too soon. Breathe. Rest. Slow. Down. After Sicily, I almost kiboshed DC. After DC, Chile seems foolhardy.

Chile, booked and all, is 10 weeks away, plenty of time to recharge and rejuvenate. Right? For now, though, I’m tired — tired of airports, planes, trains and automobiles. Hauling my junk around. Dealing with strangers. Wah-wah.

But here’s what just happened today. After a good sleep, I shook off my doubts. I was even jazzed, wide-eyed, flipping through a Chile guide book, taking notes, figuring out what is … next.

Dorothea Lange’s luminous despair

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Last week I choo-choo-trained to Washington, D.C. to scavenge through its bulging bounty of museums. (And also to get all gourmandy and eat at delish restaurants like Josè Andrès’ Mexican palace Oyamel; do order the guac and the tacos.) The US capital boasts like a billion halls of paintings, history, culture, science and more, and I visited seven in two days. Not a world’s record, but I was pacing myself. Huff, puff.

Tops for me was the National Gallery of Art — more on that in a bit. A close second was the transformative and seam-bursting National Museum of African American History and Culture, where everything from slavery and “Sanford and Son” to the Harlem Renaissance and “Harlem Shuffle” are gorgeously limned. Go.

While the National Gallery’s Rembrandts, Turners and Vermeers made me one of those vexing viewers who stands too long in front of a painting, till other patrons wonder crankily What’s he gawping at?, it was a special exhibition that really got me and did what great art can do: split open your world. 

The show, “Dorothea Lange — Seeing People,” presents some 100 black and white photographs by the great, socially astute 20th-century shutterbug. Her most enduring photo, part of the show, is probably this one from 1936, “Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother)”:

Gaze at that picture. A little harder. Its masterpiece status is unshakable.

Steeped in jagged beauty and more (prematurely) creased flesh than a dozen old folks’ homes, the exhibit “addresses Lange’s innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasizing her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism,” the museum says. 

Alright. Uplifting it’s not. It unfurls a timely, tattered tapestry of naked despair and down-on-your-luck dignity. Yet it’s so filled with shuddering pathos and raw humanity it’s hard not to be moved, shaken, taken. 

Lange’s photos are untouched authenticity — keep your Photoshop sorcery — real people with sun-baked skin and hollowed eyes, capturing the American experience of a time, the 1930s to ‘50s, and places, the Dust Bowl to San Francisco. They don’t let you off the hook.

Exhausting, yes, but exhilarating too …

“Migratory cotton picker, Eloy, Arizona” (1940)
“Mexican workers leaving for melon fields, Imperial Valley, California” (1935)
“Nettie Featherston, wife of a migratory laborer with three children, near Childress, Texas” (1938)
“Maynard and Dan Dixon” (1930)
“Young girl looks up from her work. She picks and sacks potatoes on large-scale ranch, Edison, Kern County, California” (1940)
“On the Plains a Hat Is More Than a Covering” (1938)

Food porn, Sicilian style

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

It’s 33 degrees outside and a cold winter sun glares from unblemished skies, the deep snow melts and the tweedly doodles and musical Morse code of birdsong fills the chilly air. Even inside, my hands are numb and puckered, and I should really put on gloves. But I can’t type with gloves. The blogger’s quandary.

Here’s another quandary: I just got back from my maiden voyage to Sicily — namely, the capital city Palermo — and, writerly speaking, I am constipated, all blocked up. Ex-Lax for writers — is that a thing? Gloves or no gloves, my typing is stymied. 

Let’s try this. Let’s look at a picture of one of my many fabulous meals on the fabulous trip, like this heartbreaking pizza:

Or this exquisite specimen of pistachio gelato:

And why not this prosciutto panini with a popular Italian beer:

Or the best cannoli I’ve ever had, made before my eyes in an actual nun’s convent:

See, with most of my journeys, food takes up considerable real estate on my itineraries, at least 50 percent of why I go and what I do. Art, cathedrals, quirky museums — like the marionette and Inquisition museums in Palermo, the gruesome catacombs, plus the Mafia tour I took — are mandatory and rewarding. But nothing quite so viscerally gets the gut like, say, this succulent, perfectly seasoned chicken I feasted on:

Sicily — infamous for its Mafioso, which is actively being stamped out — is the biggest island in the Mediterranean, set just below mainland Italy. It boasts a regional flavor, dialect and attitude all its own, and its denizens are a proud people. They are also unfailingly kind, helpful, funny — and self-admittedly gesticulative and loud.

All of my Ubers were sleek black Mercedes and, as it was low season last week, non-local tourists were scarce. Booking a tour or a table was a cinch, and the weather hovered in the very comfortable mid-60s. (No gloves needed!)

Palermo, a coastal city of about 700,000, is exciting the way gritty Naples is. It pulses. It’s richly historical and traffic-choked with throngs of motor scooters; graffiti-strewn and colorfully multicultural. Pet dogs are plentiful — sidewalks are mushy minefields of poop — and street food rules. Like the Sicilian Arancini, fried rice balls, nearly the size of a tennis ball, filled with melty cheese and meat. Phenomenal.  

As I’m still a bit writer’s-blocky, I exit with these non-foodie shots of the rightfully famous Palermo Cathedral, a dazzling architectural melange of Islamic, Norman and Christian influences. I’ll share more about picturesque Palermo when my brain freeze thaws. Ciao.

The days of our lies

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

“My days were pervaded by a gray drizzle of unrelenting horror.”  — William Styron

Woke up this morning mad hungry, my stomach whining like the undersea song of the humpback whale. I immediately craved French toast, or better, eggs Benedict. It was tragic. I didn’t have ingredients for either dish. Whatever. 

The dog heard me stir and scampered up the stairs and swan-dived onto the bed and stepped on my chest and licked my face. His mouth reeked of turkey dog mush — his scrumptious breakfast. For about four seconds I was turned off of food. When that passed, I remembered my breakfast predicament. Then that passed. I settled on a lowly bowl of granola. 

Mornings are rough. An inveterate night person — I perk up when the sun drops, nocturnal as a bat — “rise and shine” are curse words. While my dreams are reliably sweaty ordeals, haunted by ghosts of past, present and future, waking is almost worse, and lying in bed, eyes wide open, is immaculate torture.

That is when my mind somehow turns on me, lashing with mean, warped thoughts about almost anything, even the good stuff. For example, visions of my upcoming trip to Sicily become uncontrollably negative. I blow out of proportion everything bad that can happen, until I’m practically paralyzed with dread. I’ve nearly cancelled my trip based on these furious falsehoods. My therapist won’t return my calls.

Certain pills are meant to contain the mental carnage. I have those. And once I’m out of bed at, say, 9:15 a.m., things improve some. The “gray drizzle” quoted atop this post mostly burns off and I function like a mildly adjusted person, despite flashes of angst and misanthropy. (The self-flagellation hardly stops.)

It’s not all dread and roses. Nor is it “unrelenting horror.” Not always. It’s something in between — a little bit country, a little bit rock ’n’ roll; sweet and savory; the holy and unholy; the ripe and rotten. In the end, it doesn’t much matter. Really, it doesn’t matter.

‘X’ marks the spot

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I recently wrapped Catherine Lacey’s transfixing novel “Biography of X,” and it still haunts me. Published last year, the book is pungent and persistent, banging around my brain, impressions springing up at random moments, all of it strongly fragrant and strangely alluring.

“X” is a big book of ideas and feelings. It has a collage-like texture. It’s about art and the ravenous impulses of the artist; romantic love and its hazards; the fluidity of identity; the slipperiness of selfhood; and the rigors of creation. 

And it’s about the relationship between X, who has died, and her widow CM, the so-called writer of this fictional biography, which of course was written by Lacey in a neat feat of authorial ventriloquism.

X — who went by a swarm of pseudonyms, depending on her setting — was a shape-shifting Zelig, insinuating her self into the realms of art, music and literature, finding creative success and romantic excess, much of it to CM’s dismay and heartbreak as she researches her ex-wife’s half-cloaked life. 

In elegant, unfussy prose, Lacey conjures an alternative world in which X wrote the iconic David Bowie song “Heroes”; Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder and other major artists are killed in a terrorist bombing; and Bernie Sanders is the President of the United States. Cameos by Patti Smith, Christopher Walken, Susan Sontag and other luminaries arrive with cheeky nonchalance.

Lacey’s command of her literary experiment and the constellation of personalities she so blithely courts sometimes makes you think you’re reading an actual biography of an actual person. It’s a good trick, deft and ambitious, and a delight to plunge into.

At 38, Lacey is a bona fide wunderkind, and her performance in “Biography of X” has me trusting her to lead me farther into her cerebral yet accessible oeuvre. 

This week I got her slim gothic fable “Pew,” from 2020. It’s about an anonymous orphan who’s lacking crucial identifying components — age, name, sex, history — rattling and confounding a small, deeply religious community in the American South. 

I’m half-through this mysterious novel, whose humanity almost blinds. I’m with it all the way, totally sold. Lacey’s virtuosity sings, loud and clear as a bell. I’ll just say it: She is one of the most interesting authors of her generation.