Actor, director, musician and author David Duchovny’s latest book, The Reservoir, is his fifth. Set in the early days of COVID in an apartment perched above New York City’s Central Park, the reader follows his protagonist, Ridley, a retired Wall Street type, through a series of pandemic adventures. Finding sympathy for an investment banker proved challenging for the author.
“I knew the bare bones of what was gonna happen. I knew he was gonna see some lights across the way. I knew it was gonna be a pandemic Rear Window kind of a thing –– that excited me,” Duchovny shares. “But I thought this guy was a jerk at first, and I wanted to make him into a jerk. And then a few pages in or maybe a little more … I just opened up to this guy. And I didn't make him a hero in any way, I didn't soften his edges or make him not a jerk. But I also made him, I think, three dimensional as he went on his hero's journey.”
“The Reservoir” is an interior monologue inside a retired Wall Street banker’s mind. Image courtesy of Akashic Books.
As Ridley, long divorced, takes stock of his life in the isolation of his Central Park West apartment, he pinpoints the moment his marriage fell apart, a conceit that also appears in another of Duchovny’s books, Bucky F*cking Dent. “I've always been fascinated with that. I don't live that way. I don't judge people by an ‘aha!’ moment like that. But I'm fascinated with the idea that it's a complete revelation of character, right in that one little moment,” he says.
Duchovny notes that A Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann, was an important touchstone for him in the writing of this book as well. He first read it in high school. “I don't think I've read it since then, it's just some books, they take up a place and they never let it go.”
His book originally came out in 2022, but has now been released with a new short story, “The Scare Owl,” added in its paperback edition.
“If The Reservoir is me entering into a world of Thomas Mann or Borges or Hawthorne, which are the stories that are referenced in the afterword, that's not childhood, but that's my education. They started the conversation with me when I was in high school and I'm responding. It's taken me a while, but I'm responding,” Duchvony notes. “And the scare owl is even younger than that. I think it's really harkening back to Pinocchio … I'm fascinated with these ideas of how love can transform nature. And ‘The Scare Owl’ is in that vein of an owl. Again, it's an animal fable like Holy Cow was — an animal that transforms himself through intention, and love and loss.”