Truly Like Lightning

Book Deals: Week of February 10, 2020

By Rachel Deahl | Feb 07, 2020


photo: Tim Palen, Signid Estrada, RJ Eldridge
David Duchovny (l.), Eleanor Herman (c.),Tara Stringfellow (r.)

Duchovny’s ‘Lightning’ Strikes FSG

Actor, director, and author David Duchovny sold a novel titled Truly Like Lightning to Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. The book, which agent Andrew Blauner sold world rights to, is, FSG said, “an epic story about America, religion, family, sex, pop culture, the ’60s, education, environmentalism, greed, murder, love, and blood atonement set in a Mormon enclave in the outskirts of Los Angeles.” Duchovny, in a release, added that the novel follows “a charismatic former Hollywood stuntman turned Mormon homesteader, Joseph Smith Mulholland Bronson, who lives with his five ‘sister wives’ and 12 children on a sprawling ranch that abuts the famous Joshua Tree National Park.” Duchovny is the author of three previous novels: Bucky F*cking Dent, Holy Cow, and Miss Subways.


Publishers Weekly

Sounds like a great story. I love David's writing.

Sounds really intriguing...and his first book set outside New York. Looking forward to reading this.

thanks

We're excited to share that we’re publishing @davidduchovny’s 4th novel! TRULY LIKE LIGHTNING is an epic adventure that follows Bronson Powers, a former stuntman and Mormon, who has been homesteading outside of Joshua Tree with his 3 wives and 10 children. https://t.co/390HVO2zDc

— Farrar,Straus&Giroux (@fsgbooks) May 20, 2020

Truly Like Lightning
A Novel

David Duchovny

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

On Sale: 02/02/2021

ISBN: 9780374277741
400 Pages

$28.00

From the New York Times–bestselling author David Duchovny, an epic adventure that asks how we make sense of right and wrong in a world of extremes

For the past twenty years, Bronson Powers, former Hollywood stuntman and converted Mormon, has been homesteading deep in the uninhabited desert outside Joshua Tree with his three wives and ten children. Bronson and his wives, Yalulah, Mary, and Jackie, have been raising their family away from the corruption and evil of the modern world. Their insular existence—controversial, difficult, but Edenic—is upended when the ambitious young developer Maya Abbadessa stumbles upon their land. Hoping to make a profit, she crafts a wager with the family that sets in motion a deadly chain of events.

Maya, threatening to report the family to social services, convinces them to enter three of their children into a nearby public school. Bronson and his wives agree that if Maya can prove that the kids do better in town than in their desert oasis, they will sell her a chunk of their priceless plot of land. Suddenly confronted with all the complications of the twenty-first century that they tried to keep out of their lives, the Powerses must reckon with their lifestyle as they try to save it.

Truly Like Lightning, David Duchovny’s fourth novel, is a heartbreaking meditation on family, religion, sex, greed, human nature, and the vanishing environment of an ancient desert.

thanks

He's a real psychologist as I see. In his books he always pays attention to the vital probs.

Publishers Weekly calls Truly Like Lightning "cinematic . . . [a] jam-packed page-turner," thanks @PWreviews! pic.twitter.com/kPmmCw0Iqp

— David Duchovny (@davidduchovny) October 18, 2020

Truly Like Lightning

David Duchovny. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 (448p) ISBN 978-0-374-27774-1

Actor Duchovny’s cinematic fourth novel (after Miss Subways) takes a bucking ride through the 21st-century American West, ranging from Hollywood to religious fervor out in the desert. Former stuntman Bronson Powers has left Los Angeles to embrace the Mormon faith, forging a life with three wives and 10 children on a vast tract of land near Joshua Tree, Calif. But a snake comes into this Eden in the form of ambitious young developer Maya Abbadessa. Determined to buy a portion of the Powers plot, Maya schemes to put the homeschooling Bronson in a bind with the state’s board of education. Three of his children end up placed in a San Bernardino public school. The youngest, 11-year-old Hyrum, is troubled, as is his mother, Mary, Bronson’s third wife. Having chosen to stay with the children, Mary quickly reverts to her old caffeinated, self-medicated ways of coping. Things spiral out of control, epically and violently, after Hyrum is beaten by a group of kids in a school parking lot, and Bronson, swept up in the righteousness of his faith, takes the boy’s fate, and the law, into his own hands. The characters tend to be flat, but the author manages to spin this tall tale exceedingly well. Duchovny’s jam-packed page-turner is just waiting for someone to snap up the film rights. (Feb.)


PublishersWeekly.com

David Duchovny wants to be taken seriously as a novelist. His new book makes a good case.

By Mark Athitakis
Feb. 1, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. GMT-3

The first thing to know about David Duchovny the novelist is that he’s serious about being David Duchovny the novelist. In the acknowledgments of his latest book, “Truly Like Lightning,” he recalls studying under the literary scholar Harold Bloom as a grad student at Yale, and for the past half-decade Duchovny, now 60, has been pumping out fiction that reveals an eagerness to be seen as a legitimate capital-W writer, not just a famous TV actor (“The X-Files,” “Californication”) with an interesting hobby. (Oh, he has a sideline as a singer-songwriter too.)

Ambition and seriousness haven’t guaranteed successful novels, though. To date his literary output has included “Holy Cow” (2015), a slight yarn about a cow that roams off its homestead; “Bucky F*cking Dent” (2016), a modest father-son bonding tale framed around the 1978 World Series and “Miss Subways” (2018), a high-concept romance inspired (and overwhelmed) by Duchovny’s fascination with Irish folklore. He’s still working out his identity as a writer, and thus far that identity has been well-intentioned celeb turned author who hasn’t embarrassed himself.

“Truly Like Lightning,” his fourth novel, is another left turn: a stab at a hefty, Tom Wolfe-style social novel that wrestles with big themes. But his most complex novel is also the best of the batch, and makes a solid case for him as a real-deal novelist. It’s a provocative, entertaining book that, much like Wolfe did, exposes our collective foibles and makes everybody look a little cartoonish. But it persuades you that we deserve the caricature he’s made of us.


(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The plot is straightforward worlds-in-collision material. Bronson (tellingly nicknamed “Bro”) is a middle-aged retired stuntman who’s abandoned Hollywood and its attendant addictions to move to the desert near Joshua Tree. There, he’s inherited a swath of land from his grandmother, whose sole request was that he convert to Mormonism. Seduced by the faith’s outsider-ish, independent spirit, in due time Bronson is living an unplugged life with two wives and 10 children. “He was that most dangerous man,” Duchovny writes, “an originalist and a true believer.”

Literally crashing into Bronson’s singular homestead is Maya, a mid-level functionary at an LA investment firm. She smashes a car on his property during a druggy weekend with her colleagues, but she’s sober enough to see the potential riches in Bronson’s property. And she spots a certain seductiveness in Bronson’s back-to-the-land spirituality. It’s a socioeconomic-psychopharmacological-religious meet-cute.

Bronson’s off-the grid lifestyle (home schooling, unpaid taxes, polygamy) makes him legally vulnerable, but Maya wants her company, not the government, to claim the land. So the two sides work out a wager: Three of Bronson’s kids will enter Southern California schools, and if they thrive Maya’s firm won’t attempt to build casinos and strip malls on the land. It’s a hokey setup, but Duchovny is spiritedly determined to work through the various permutations of this man-and-Mammon tale. Maya is hubris in high heels, certain that money subsidizes integrity: “Once she had power and some security and eyes on her, then she would lean in, make a turn to the good, to charity and conservation. Like Bill Gates. Like a reverse Koch bro.” And Bronson is sure his hardcore Mormonism is shield enough: “I believe all or I believe nothing. And if I believe nothing, I am nothing. I swallow it whole.”

Of course, this all speedily goes sideways. Bronson’s demure daughter Pearl transforms into a high school belle, landing the role of Maria in the class production of “West Side Story.” His son Deuce attempts to establish a union at the burger joint where he works. And his tweenage son Hyrum, a feral kid in the desert, finds that city living intensifies a resentment and fury that sets some third-act cataclysms in motion. One of Bronson’s sister-wives hits the Adderall. Maya and Bronson begin a flirtation. Jealousies abound.

Because the three kids are “desert tabula rasa,” each of them serve as opportunities for Duchovny to riff on some element of American life: racism, moralized ideas about sex and fidelity, drugs, and — how could he resist? — Hollywood. (In an amusing subplot, Maya is assigned to sift through a library of ’50s B-movie schlock for potentially lucrative reboots.)


“Truly Like Lightning” author David Duchovny (Tim Palen)

Money and faith, though, are Duchovny’s chief obsessions. Conformity with the system, for Bronson, is a form of spiritual death that leaves you “unsaved, unforgiven, damned.” But religion, too, is a kind of banishment. Various characters ping-pong between the secular and the spiritual, stoked either by moral certainty or quick fixes: “It’s like you use God when you need him and psychology when you don’t,” as one of Bronson’s sister-wives tells another.

Duchovny doesn’t do much more than raise questions about these issues as the story speeds to its fittingly biblical climax. (“Does being able to kill for an idea make that idea true? ... Does dying for an idea make that idea worth dying for?”) But Duchovny earns the wide canvas he’s stretched. He has a cinematic understanding of how to keep his characters in motion and conflict, and Bronson’s undiluted Mormonism gives Duchovny a metaphor for American reinvention. We all want a creed that “sought relief from the crushing weight of the past, the old stories, and a willingness to embrace the new — new gods, new peoples and heroes, new stories.”

Good for Duchovny. He’s not playacting at fiction. But “Truly Like Lightning” also reveals a celebrity’s privilege: He’s had the opportunity to develop his voice across three novels before writing one that resonates, more leeway than what’s now afforded most emerging writers, who have to take off like a rocket or be all but banished. We could use more David Duchovny novels: funny, big-picture, irreverent. We could also use a literary culture that nurtures more writers the way it has Duchovny.

Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

Truly Like Lightning

By David Duchovny

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 464 pp. $28


Washington Post

On the Shelf: "Truly Like Lightning"

Reviewed by Lynn Bonney Mar 6, 2021 Updated 21 hrs ago



“Truly Like Lightning,” By David Duchovny. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. $28

David Duchovny may always be linked with his role on “The X Files,” but he has also made his name as an author, having produced three novels that were moderate successes. He moves his bookish reputation up a notch with a fourth novel “Truly Like Lightning.”

In this entertaining, thought-provoking novel, Duchovny takes on a variety of subjects, from faith and family to modern greed and the endangered environment. That sounds like a heavy assignment, but he manages to pull it off – and toss in a generous handful of wry observations in the doing.

In “Truly Like Lightning,” we meet Bronson Powers, a one-time Hollywood stuntman, who is doing his best to live as a good Mormon, according to his interpretation of what a good Mormon should do. After a somewhat haphazard background that included a flirtation with Scientology, Bronson picked up the writings of Joseph Smith and established his foundation in Mormonism according to the original sources. He may have gotten some things wrong, but he’s sincere in his beliefs.

Having acquired three wives and 10 children, he has settled into a self-sustaining existence outside Joshua Tree, California. They live in blissful isolation, with no telephone, no television, no links to the outside world, except his occasional trips into town to buy essentials they cannot produce themselves. The children are being educated by wives Yalulah and Mary; first wife Jackie died several years earlier.

Enter into the idyllic scene: Maya, a young and ambitious real-estate developer who quickly develops a plan for the Powers property, a valuable acreage Bronson inherited from his grandmother. When Bronson proves reluctant to sell a piece of the property, the inventive Maya comes up with a plan. Three of the Powers children will enroll in public school for a year. If they do well and are happy, Bronson will go ahead with the sale. If the plan doesn’t work out, Maya will withdraw the offer.

Accompanied by mother Mary, the three oldest children, twins Deuce and Pearl and 11-year-old Hyrum, move into town. Mary begins to pick up some memories of her life before Bronson, rediscovering — among other things — the joys of Starbucks. Deuce tries to fit in at the school. He’s an excellent student, but he can’t join a sports team because he’s never even seen a football or soccer game. Pearl is the beautiful new girl on campus, but she has no idea how to respond to the other girls, much less the boys who pay attention to her. And Hyrum? Well, he presents problems all his own.

The year proves to be a time of trying and testing for all the Powerses, as well as for Maya and the other hard-driving members of the property-development “team.” Bronson’s philosophy of life is hard to maintain in the face of 21st-century reality. His faith, which he has always described as “the ground beneath my feet,” may not be sustainable, an unnerving prospect for everyone involved.

Duchovny has created a believable, if out-of-kilter, family in “Truly Like Lightning.” There’s much to enjoy and ponder in this book.

Emporia Public Library staff and volunteers write “On the Shelf.”


Emporia Gazette

David Duchovny on 'Truly Like Lightning'; Ketanji Brown Jackson's old debate team

March 25, 202212:26 PM ET



"The X-Files" actor David Duchovny talks bout his novel "Truly Like Lightning," which had its origins in an episode that Duchovny wrote for the show. The novel is now out in paperback and Duchovny is developing a series based on the book for Showtime.

And, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson credits her path to success to her experience on her high school debate team. Current students on the team say Jackson's nomination is changing the way they see themselves. WLRN's Kate Payne reports.


NPR