THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 17
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LIGHTSONTHECORNER
T
wo of David Duchovny’s biggest
pet peeves, in coverage of his work
as an actor and a novelist, are bad puns
referencing “The X-Files” and any sug-
gestion that his fancy education—Prince-
ton (undergrad) and Yale (M.A. in En-
glish lit)—accounts for his aptitude as
a writer. Duchovny finds both defaults
lame. The emphasis on alma maters is
a corollary of the kind of thinking that
prompts people to say, on hearing that
an actor has published a novel, “Who
does he think he is?”
“Who does anyone think they are?”
Duchovny asked the other night, in his
familiar gentle deadpan. “You have to
have an ego to think you have the right
to publish anything. It’s a fine question
David DuchovnyI tell them stories of how I started Paper
on a typewriter. They love my art col-
lection because I’m an O.G. They love
O.G.s.” Hanging out with young peo-
ple is one of the things she misses the
most. The New Now is a remedy. The
youngest contributor is five years old;
the eldest, eighty-seven. They’re all New
Yorkers. “This is just one of my dinner
parties,” she said. “It’s a soup. It has all
the spices.” Also, soup recipes.
The New Now, which takes the form
of a twenty-seven-by-seventeen-inch
broadside, is being distributed—free,
analog only, no ads—to six thousand
New Yorkers and out-of-state people
who are New Yorkers at heart. Next, she
wants to make a New Now covering the
whole country—then the world. To cel-
ebrate the release, Hastreiter planned
a party where the conceptual artist Jill
Magid would hand out special pennies
engraved with the phrase “The body was
already so fragile.” Magid made a hun-
dred and twenty thousand of the coins,
to represent the value of the stimulus
checks distributed last spring. Hastreiter
hoped that her guests would make rub-
bings on copies of The New Now, and
then spend their pennies in bodegas in
the five boroughs.
—Dana Goodyear
to ask: Who the fuck do you think you
are?” He was in the midst of revealing a
little bit about who he is, or thinks he is,
by way of a sentimental meander through
the East Village, the neighborhood of
his youth. He’d just gone to see his mother,
who is ninety-one, in her apartment on
Ninth Street: a rare visit, in this Covid
year. He’d brought her a copy of his new
novel, “Truly Like Lightning,” out this
month. It is his fourth, all of them pub-
lished by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Does
she read them?
“No. She just feels the weight of them.”
He had on white Adidas Superstars,
skinny gray jeans, a black down jacket,
and a blue N95 over a salt-and-pepper
beard. He’s sixty—trim of build, sly of
manner, youthful of spirit. He’d been
living during the pandemic on the Upper
West Side with his son, a senior in high
school. He got Covid in October.
He drew up to his childhood apart-
ment building, on Eleventh Street and
Second Ave., across from St. Mark’s
Church. “My mom at this time every
night thinks she has to get back to this
apartment,” he said. “She doesn’t think
she’s in the right apartment.” His mother,
Meg, is a Scottish Lutheran, a former
schoolteacher; his father, Ami, was a
publicist and writer who published his
first novel at the age of seventy-three, a
year before he died. (Duchovny’s grand-
father Moshe, who’d fled Stalin’s purges,
was a Yiddish-language newspaperman
in Brooklyn.)
“See the lights on the corner there?
On the third floor? Two windows down.
That was my bedroom, and this was my
view.” He gestured toward the church-yard. “It’s a weird view. It’s a graveyard.
We used to play baseball there. The head-
stones were flat, and we used them as
bases.” Just then, the bells began to chime.
“Wow,” he said. “I’m gonna dissolve.”
Earlier, he’d passed by Grace Church
School, another alma mater (high school
was uptown, at Collegiate), where he
and his now ex-wife, Téa Leoni, were
married—in the courtyard. “She was a
divorcée, I was half Jewish, so I got the
garden. Didn’t matter that I’d gone there
or that my mother had taught there for
thirty years. The law’s the law.”
Religious law was top of mind, perhaps.
“Truly Like Lightning” tells the story of
an ex-stuntman who converts to his own
heretical interpretation of Mormonism,
to inherit a chunk of California desert,
where he lives off the grid with his wives.
A real-estate investor, on a Joshua Tree
peyote retreat, stumbles into their com-
pound, and trouble and mirth ensue.
“I had a thread of a story I wanted to
tell based on some Mormon precepts,”
Duchovny said, “and I only knew them
because I wrote an ‘X-File’ in, like, 2000,
where I made a fictional character out of
a Mormon forger named Mark Hofmann,
who—it’s an amazing story.” Hofmann
composed fake and damning “lost let-
ters” in the hand of Joseph Smith, to con
the Church into paying to suppress them.
“I don’t like research at all,” he said.
“I’m really lazy that way. But if I have
an idea I farm it out. I find a graduate
student somewhere and give them pa-
rameters.” He went on, “I wrote this one
when I was rebuilding my house in Mal-
ibu and was living in a train car on my
property. It’s a tiny little space, like a lit-
tle box. I get up at four to write. I like
when it’s dark out. I like feeling like I’m
getting a jump on people.”
He passed the asphalt expanse of
Peter’s Field, the home park of his youth,
on Twentieth Street, and then headed
east to Peter Cooper Village, whose leafy
confines he’d aspired to as a boy. He
stopped at another lot. “I spent a lot of
time in this basketball court,” he said.
“I remember the worst thing I ever saw
on the court was a guy spit in another
guy’s face. I recall it with a shudder. What
are the origins of that gesture? It’s just
about the worst thing you can do to a
person.” He paused. “Unless they want
it.” He grinned. “I don’t judge.”
—Nick Paumgarten