The result is not really a book-within-a-book but, rather, a book encased in the glistening film of a different title, author, and genre. Lucca’s fictional biography makes up the entirety of Lacey’s novel. “Biography of X” sheds the container, with no frame story to situate the discovery of its inner document. Le Guin’s “ Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by including all the books, one an academic monograph, that are found in a character’s handbag. Lucy Ives’s “ Life Is Everywhere” manifests Ursula K. Hernan Diaz’s “ Trust” builds itself in reverse across three backstories. Benjamín Labatut’s “ When We Cease to Understand the World” drifts through histories of scientific discovery with fantastical insertions. Lacey’s book, which is trimmed with photographs, historical data, collected interviews, and secondary sources, joins a recent spate of critically acclaimed novels that adorn themselves with the formal signifiers of nonfiction-imaginary footnotes or citations, the haze of archival research, narratives that peel themselves from the individual and float over a wider range. And “biography”? The whole story of a whole life, an aspiration that glides so flush into the corners of the untrue that one could easily assume that fiction is its rightful category, its most logical shape.

“X” is already a placeholder for the undetermined, the interchangeable, the illiterate, or the nameless. It makes sense that there is no “the”-or “a” or “this” or “my”-in Lacey’s title, as the project that the title alludes to quickly slips from its grasp. Both title pages mention the same publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This copyright reads “2005,” rather than “2023” you might rustle back a couple of pages to compare, and notice, on Lacey’s title page, the subheading “A Novel,” missing in C.

Darkness lifts to reveal a second, nested title page, for a slightly different book: “Biography of X,” by C.

As you open Lacey’s “ Biography of X,” turning past the expected copyright and title, you reach a sequence of gradually lightening blacked-out pages, “ Tristram Shandy” turned flip-book. I found myself habitually inserting “The” in the title when the book came up in conversation, that brief sound of specificity, the most common word in the English language and the most wishful. The first thing that you notice about Catherine Lacey’s new novel is the lack of a determiner.

Tangled Hearts by Catherine Vale