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445 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2021
"words are to the world as omens are to time."before he pursued acting, david duchovny was a lit major, earning a bachelor's from princeton (summa cum laude with a senior thesis entitled the schizophrenic critique of pure reason in beckett's early novels) and a masters/abd from yale, where he studied under canon-maker harold bloom. duchovny's fourth novel, truly like lightning, is the tale of a charismatic, former hollywood stuntman turned mormon homesteading recluse — and his three wives, his ten kids, and the greedy developer who aims to upend their simple, devout, back-to-the-land lifestyle. an absolutely entertaining story twinned with solid explorations of faith, family, capitalism, 21st century america (the novel is set during trump's ignominious reign), the rights of man, landscape, law, and violence, duchovny's new book is darn good and it's clear he has legit writing chops.
ah, the true american story of genocide, slavery, and rape hidden beneath the beautiful, obfuscating, july fourth words... he said there's only one trinity worth addressing, one that consists of capitalism, racism, and climate change, and like the holy trinity, he felt that those three issues are at base one in the same, and that he hoped to find the common root and yank it from the american soil.truly like lightning is being adapted into a showtime series (co-written by duchovny and the writer-director team behind the peanut butter falcon) and set to star duchovny himself as the lead.
[W]hen are the children ready to leave home? Will they venture out into the world as soft innocents and get corrupted? Were they going to go to college? But then he would argue with himself that society itself is the sickness. Can they learn of and cure that sickness without being infected by it? Is there an inoculation for the incurable mental disease that infects every participant in the civilization? Can they be in the world one day but not of it?
It’s so much worse than you can imagine. They all have their own phones now. No one looks anyone in the eye. There’s something hideous called ‘social media.’ It’s the worst of the worst. Like when Sartre said, ‘hell is other people’ … he must’ve been prophesying this. Hell is other people with phones.
The spiritual vertigo that Trump induced in Mary was all pervasive, and threatened to redline her growing sense of dislocation in Rancho Cucamonga. Trump’s deep, blind wound had created something less than a full human, a gargoyle who fed on chaos and hurt. The hate in him, like a dark shaman, brought out the hate in this country. Mary felt the regression, the violence, everywhere, and it freaked her out. She was not even sure that the desert was safe from this unleashed primordial, Cain-like vengeance; she sensed it spreading and borderless, like air pollution.