Lightning Strikes Twice > A New Novel on the American Mormon Religion + A New Series on Showtime

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Truly Like Lightning

US Macmillan |

A Novel

David Duchovny

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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

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Here's a subReddit post about the book

 

David Duchovny (star of the x-files) wrote a novel about "Mormonism"

(self.latterdaysaints)

submitted 2 months ago * by mysteriousPerson 

 

 

The relevant portion, from the Wall Street Journal, is here:

 

His latest, “Truly Like Lightning,” out Feb. 2, concerns a large family of devout Mormons—three wives, 10 children and one zealous patriarch, a former pill-popping Hollywood stunt man—who must defend their unconventional, off-the-grid lifestyle and valuable land in the California desert against the rapacious schemes of a young developer. Part family drama, part corporate satire, part philosophical inquiry into the appeal and limits of faith, the novel considers the challenges of reconciling religious belief with the vices and depredations of the 21st century. Kirkus Reviews praised his “characteristically nimble prose” and “the complicated humanity of his multifarious cast.”

‘I don’t want to be falsely humble. This is an ambitious novel for me.’

“I don’t want to be falsely humble. This is an ambitious novel for me,” says Mr. Duchovny. Although he isn’t religious himself (his Jewish father and Scottish mother raised him in Manhattan to believe mainly in books), he writes compellingly about theism and sympathetically about Mormonism, which he finds fascinating for being so “quintessentially American.” He quotes the late Harold Bloom, his former professor at Yale, who famously described Joseph Smith, the 19th-century founder of Mormonism, as “an authentic religious genius” for his blend of Christian scripture and American can-do spirit.

“It couldn’t be more American for someone to get up there and say, ‘As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be,’” says Mr. Duchovny, citing Mormon doctrine. He says that writing about a religion that believes in the potential for miracles in our time was a way to write about the pluck and hubris of the U.S. itself.

Looks like there's an excerpt from the book here: Truly Like Lightning | David Duchovny | Macmillan

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