Monsterpieces: Two Women

Olga Tokarczuk and Catherine Lacey

[Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (2022) and Lacey’s Biography of X (2023) are far apart in space and time—Europe and the United States, the 18th century and a counterfactual 20th century—but both are long and experimentally constructed biographies of charismatic figures, Tokarczuk’s a real man, Lacey’s an invented woman, one a mystic monster, the other an art monster. The following reviews were published a year apart, and I didn’t recognize the commonalities at the time. The protagonists are exploitive scamsters, playing on their victims’ emotions to create, respectively, a religious cult and a cult of personality. The authors, however, fragment their narrations. The authors elicit emotion, yes, but also make sure their alienation effects encourage an intellectual response to moral monstrosity. Lacey’s almost contemporary scene and personal focus will probably be of more interest to most readers, but I think Tokarczuk’s history is the more valuable because it shows the larger dangers of amoral charisma, especially when it combines with religion and politics to create a cult devoted to a monstrous leader.]

Books of Jacob

Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob was published in Polish in 2014 and was cited by the Nobel Prize committee in her award in 2018. When published in English, the novel received many rave reviews in both England and America, and The Books of Jacob was on the National Book Awards long list for translated literature but was left off its short list, prompting this somewhat belated review and small remedy.

Set in 18^th century middle Europe and clocking in at well over 900 pages with a cast of hundreds, The Books of Jacob is a monsterpiece and, perhaps, a masterpiece. “Monstrous” because of its size, its deformation of narrative conventions, and its relation to the etymology of “monster”: warning. The Jacob of Tokarczuk’s title is Jacob Frank, an historical character born in 1726—a Polish Jewish mystic who became a Muslim, then a Catholic, then a monster like more recent “sacred” leaders who became self-serving tyrants. Early reviewers struggling to describe the plot complications and formal excesses of the novel paid little attention to the warning element of the book. The 19^th century German sociologist Max Weber described the “routinization of charisma” in modern organizations and bureaucracies, but since Weber’s time charismatic figures as different as Hitler, Jim Jones, King Jong Un, and Donald Trump have wreaked havoc. Although the pre-Enlightenment world of the novel will seem alien—partly because of Tokarczuk’s obsession with theological and quotidian detail—a bogged reader can push though by recognizing the novel as a distant mirror of seductive and destructive charisma.

What is now Poland is the perfect setting for a boundary-crossing novel, for the boundaries of Poland have been constantly changing since the 18^th century. Characters wander across states that no longer exist or exist now within different countries. Tokarczuk’s plot wanders along with Frank’s movements. He lives for a time in Turkey, gathers followers, moves back to Poland, recruits more followers, spends more than a decade in a Polish prison, is released by invading Russians, and sets up a court in what is now Austria. While Tokarczuk may not have been aware of the word “bounder,” her Jacob fits the bill, an immoral man, particularly in his relations with women. In fact, Jacob’s radical theology demands immorality, the reversal of Mosaic and Christian laws, especially those governing sex. He directs his followers to have intercourse with those not their spouses, and he has something like a harem of concubines. His cultists tolerate his destruction of family bonds because of Frank’s magnetism and his not quite explicit promise that his loyalists shall live forever. They don’t, but the novel has something like a happy ending. Before Frank’s death, his patriarchal power wanes and women fill the void left by the monster/master.

Geographical and moral boundary crossings have their analogues in Tokarczuk’s quick shifting among genres and styles: anecdotes, journals, dreams, travelogues, songs, and more. There are seven “books” within the novel, and sections within these books are rarely more than four pages long. Some are about Jacob. More are about or narrated by his followers, not just their relation to him but their relations to their families, their homes, their clothing, their food, their language, their changing names. As a fragmented “encyclopedic novel,” The Books of Jacob can be compared—for American readers--to two huge American historical novels set in 20^th century middle Europe—Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Vollmann’s Europe Central. And yet Tokarczuk’s variousness of styles, as well as her inclusions of visual materials, is more like Le Guin’s spirit-filled anthropological fiction, Always Coming Home. Like Le Guin, Tokarczuk has a figure—Jacob’s grandmother Yente—who sees all from something like an angelic position outside of death. An intelligence described as “someone tenderly observing” characters’ lives, Yente is a stand-in for the novelist whose Nobel acceptance speech asked for more tenderness from fiction writers.

Most of Tokarczuk’s Jewish and Christian characters obsess about judgment, but she almost never explicitly judges her characters, even Jacob when he is beyond the boundary of sense and sympathy. Perhaps because there is a side of Tokarczuk that resembles Jacob, his ambition to destroy old values and to synthesize new ones, his insistence on his followers’ (readers’) attention to his unlikely and difficult stories. The difference: Jacob is interested only in his most faithful and useful followers while Tokarczuk attends to them and to some sceptics in the novel: a priest named Chmielowski who is compiling a secular encylopedia, a physician named Rubin who debunks mystic cures, Antoni Kossakowski, a fabulist who lies even more than Jacob. There are two literary and sympathetic noblewomen in the novel, and Jacob’s daughter Eva acquires substance near the end, and of course there is Yente, but despite all the sympathies that Tokarczuk displays for these figures The Books of Jacob is, like the books of the Bible, a male-dominated compendium.

Tokarczuk sometimes suffers from graduate student dissertation disease, including in her book information she discovered in her research that could have been left out. Not so much information about daily life as arcane theological theories and disputes. She also often uses letters between characters to convey information. I know the epistolary novel was popular in the 18^th century, but the formality of the correspondence sucks life from The Books of Jacob. A reviewer for a Jewish publication, The Tablet, said “A Polish Christian writes the great Jewish novel.” If so, she has done it while living in a country ruled by a Christian right-wing government that has passed laws forbidding frank (pun intended) discussions of the Holocaust. Yente and Tokarczuk are not ranting Cassandras, but The Books of Jacob is, I will repeat, a warning about both charismatic and bureaucratic orthodoxy. In 2013 the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in a jagged postmodern building in Warsaw. The Books of Jacob is a worthy portable companion to that monument of memory.

Biography of X

“Ambition was the worst sin,” a minor character tells the narrator of Biography of X, “wanting any dominance over someone else.” Catherine Lacey’s novel is full of this “sin”: the life-long domineering actions of the protagonist, an artist who names herself “X”; the book-long revenge on X by her widow and narrator of the novel. And, perhaps, Lacey’s attempted dominance of her readers with her incessant literary game-playing. That former chess master Nabokov thought of his novels as games with and against readers. Perhaps the most ambitious was Pale Fire in which a crazed Russian émigré purports to interpret the life and work of an American poet who is the Russian’s neighbor. Intimate domination, the worst sin in Biography of X.

Lacey’s game begins right after her real title page: a fake title page that presents “C. M. Lucca” as the author of Biography of X. The former journalist Lucca decides to look into some lacunae in a doorstop biography of X by Theodore Smith, a book that Lucca finds banal and “worthless.” For Lucca, a “life” was disrespectful of the many lives led by the shape-shifting X—who used pseudonyms for her writing, work with famous musicians, and numerous art installations. Disrespectful also because X resisted and resented anyone, even her wife, who might delve into her past and secrets, of which Lucca finds plenty. After ferreting out the crucial secret of X’s birth and childhood, Lucca becomes extremely ambitious, traveling the U.S. and abroad to interview people who knew X at different stages of her life and to dig up presumably lost documents. Begun as a project of rage against Smith and grief for the recently deceased X, Lucca’s biography ends with anger against the sadistic X and a different kind of grief, that of never knowing the woman that Lucca loved and was dominated by.

Lucca’s scholarly project--that plods through the chronology of X’s life and is replete with a scaffolding of fake notes and altered sources--was easy enough for Lacey to imitate. What was not so easy was establishing the artistic genius of X and her ability to find wives, friends, collaborators—just about everyone she met—to dominate. X’s output was prodigious, but since her works—unlike those by, say, Kathy Acker who was a friend of X and perhaps one model for Lacey—don’t exist, Lacey’s creative ambition is tested. Readers get short descriptions of X’s visual works and critics’ responses, as well as Lucca’s, to them, but the works described never convinced me that X was a towering multimedia artist of the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps I would be a believer if I saw more of her novels. Excerpts could have been included (just as Pale Fire begins with a 999-line poem). And X’s paintings and sculptures could have been created and photographed—if Lacey’s ambition was equal to the “ferocious ambitions” of her subject.

Once I’m unconvinced of X as artist, I’m skeptical about her domination of or large influence on others’ personal lives. Maybe not Lucca’s, who seemed a doormat when she met X, but historical figures such as David Bowie, Wim Wenders, and Denis Johnson. When Lucca interviews X’s long-lost family or her former lovers or her gallerist or an Italian political activist, none of them is capable of explaining X’s magnetic power. It doesn’t seem to be erotic. More neurotic, her intense need to impress others while simultaneously alienating them. If I were interviewed, I might say—without really knowing X—that she was a monstrous three-headed fusion of Acker, Martina Obramaovic, and Susan Sontag on speed.

Since I don’t believe in X, I don’t believe Lucca. Biography of X may be a fiction—Lucca’s fiction—within Lacey’s novel. In Pale Fire, Nabokov signals his biographer’s unreliability by having him believe he is the escaped king of Zembla. Lucca is merely an escapee from a boring marriage, but she has plenty of motives to write a fictive takedown of X. Lacey’s unreliability tip is exaggeration—the obsessiveness of Lucca’s project, along with X’s hyper-protean character and Lacey’s own game-playing with actual quotes she has repurposed to describe X. A lot of ideas, invention, and research went into Biography of X, but ultimately its ambition doesn’t reach me—or dominate me as it seems to have some raving reviewers.

Lacey does herself no favors by setting her unreliable text in a counterfactual space. Yes, there are many realistic scenes in downtown New York City, but it exists in something Lacey calls the Northern Territory. Right after World War II, southern states seceded to become a theocracy (from which, spoiler alert, X escapes). Now the USA is composed of the former Southern Territory, the Northern Territory, and the Western Territory (from which X also escapes). The counterfactuals allow a good deal of easy (not very ambitious) satire and, I guess, fun since Emma Goldman is FDR’s former chief of staff in the North. Unfortunately, though, the invented setting diminishes the reality of the invented characters who occupy it.

X was a master of style, of unconventional costumes and disguises, a pre Lady Gaga. X was also very good at sophistical sentences and cutting remarks. She could do accents. The few journal entries that Lucca quotes about X’s unhappiness as a woman could be profound or sophomoric. Lucca, unfortunately, is a master of journalism with a conventional sensibility and reliance on the language of victimhood. If X had written her own autobiography in Lucca’s style, it would have been something like Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The biographer/interpreter in Pale Fire may be a schizoid academic, but he still sounds like a Nabokov creation. Perhaps Lacey chose a rather pedestrian style for her narrator as a way to elicit belief in her improbable protagonist, but Lucca’s prose is not a way to make this reader believe in X or her biography, no matter who wrote it.

Is it possible everything in Biography of X is a parody: of the performing celebrity (think Warhol), of the insider biography (like the one Roth wanted), of political clichés (the southerners are dumb), of Pale Fire (high art)? Biography of X even seems to parody Sebald’s inclusion of photos in his fictions. Lacey has numerous photographs that are supposed to suggest the mystery of X but actually manage only to satisfy the conventions of biography. Maybe even written language is a parody--of speaking, of live dialogue or performance, a notion suggested by the talk marathons that X has when she meets new intimates. Lucca and Lacey both throw up their hands at times and imply “you just had to be there.” I wasn’t.

I usually have a high tolerance for Lacey’s kind of literary ambition and game-playing, even that which extends into excess. I can say I finished the thousand-plus pages of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. I looked forward to the seventeen volumes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “Familiar” project. But the parodic academic biography is a tough act to pull off at great length. Biography of X would have been a better novel, perhaps dominating my disbelief, had the book been half its length. Siri Hustvedt’s novel Blazing World about a radical feminist artist in New York is the same length as Lacey’s novel, but Hustvedt is more narrow in her purview—less ambitious, perhaps, but more believable, more emotionally engaging. Everyone in Biography of X--both women and men, straight and gay--finds X fascinating, but they might not if—like me--they read all of Lucca’s “biography.”

The initial impetus of Lucca’s research is the work of a male biographer and critic. Perhaps Lacey is playing a game against me, the male reviewer who, she may believe, will reveal gender bias with his lack of sympathy for the woman warrior, the feminist outlaw, the art monster. Since that’s a possibility, don’t write off Lacey. But I recommend getting on the wait list at the library and sampling fifty pages of Biography of X before you plunk down twenty-eight bucks. Visual artist and verbal provocateur, X was also a scam artist, relieving people of their money. Caveat emptor.