David Duchovny has a charming new novel
Stranger than any “X-Files” episode is David Duchovny’s transformation into a novelist. This isn’t another sad case of those celebrities Who Just Do Stuff. Duchovny actually demonstrates some literary panache. Starting in 2015 with “Holy Cow” (narrated by an itinerant Holstein), he’s been publishing charming novels that glitter with silliness.
His latest, “Miss Subways,” is an old-fashioned romantic comedy that takes its title from the posters that featured attractive working women on New York subway cars for several decades starting in 1941. But the story’s real inspiration reaches back many more centuries to the tale of Emer and Cu Chulainn in Irish mythology. Consequently, this may be the only novel ever to start with epigraphs by W.B. Yeats and Ed Koch. Take that incongruity as fair warning for the blarney that lies ahead.
Our heroine, Emer, is a talented first-grade teacher in modern-day New York City. Like this novel, her personality is marked by what Duchovny calls a “charismatic, universal, lighthearted melancholy.” At 41, she’s already spent several years encouraging her boyfriend, Con, a failed academic. Ignoring her own desire to write, Emer works as Con’s unpaid assistant on his research about the intermingling of religious and mythological beliefs brought to America.
What little we see of Con’s slapdash thesis doesn’t inspire much confidence that he’ll ever find the success that Emer thinks he deserves. And what we see of Con himself makes it difficult to fathom Emer’s devotion. “If Twitter mated with Malcolm Gladwell ... and moved a little to the right,” Con says, “that’s me.”
One night while worrying about Con’s fidelity, Emer is visited by a little Irish doorman. Even if you don’t recognize the name Bean Sidhe as the Celtic fairies who foretell death, you’ll pick up on something odd about this profane visitor. (But don’t call him a leprechaun; he hates that.) Brushing aside Emer’s questions — and ours — Bean Sidhe explains that Con has offended the gods of Africa with “his right-wing-spin shenanigans,” and he’s about to be murdered by Anansi, the West African trickster god. Emer can save Con only if she vows never to see him again. “To prove your love for him,” Bean Sidhe says, “you have to let go of your love.”
Before you can pick the petals off a shamrock, Emer wakes up in a revised version of her life — without Con. She’s just a middle-aged grade-school teacher muddling through with a vague sense that something’s missing. “All the images from last night receded and fled from any sort of specificity,” Duchovny writes, “replaced now by a deep, pervasive feeling of ambient loss, of being bereft. Bereft of what, she did not know.”
What follows is a Celtic version of “Groundhog Day,” as Emer meets a charming man named Con and learns once again that they cannot remain together. But Duchovny is in no hurry to cycle through that doomed romance. “Miss Subways” is definitely single-tracking, with lots of unloading along the way. If you can get yourself to stop focusing on the destination, there are plenty of oddly charming incidents to enjoy. Duchovny is particularly funny on the antics of schoolchildren and their uptight parents. He’s also got a great ear for the anxieties of dating, and the sweet comedy of middle-aged sex.
When heady quotations from Carl Jung and Kierkegaard appear on the walls of the subway cars, it’s tempting to wonder if the spirit of Con’s pseudo-intellectualism hasn’t infected the novel too deeply. But Duchovny isn’t just another
pretty face. With an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master’s degree in English from Yale, he handles these references with discernment and wit.