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

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.

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