The curse of the meaningless

Actor David Duchovny’s new novel explores fathers and sons, Red Sox and Yankees

On Oct. 2, 1978, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, with 99 wins and 63 losses apiece, took to the field at Fenway Park in a one- game playoff for a ticket to the postseason. It was anybody’s game until short-stop Bucky Dent, batting a mediocre .243 for the season with only four homers to his name, walked up to the plate.

What Red Sox fans assumed would be an out turned into a lazy fly ball over the Green Monster in left field, a go- ahead home run en route to a Yankees victory that led to Sox fans dubbing the shortstop “Bucky F*cking Dent” to this day, and with such vigour that it may as well be on his birth certificate.

David Duchovny’s novel of the same name takes place during that fateful 1978 season. Wide on theme, it touches on everything from baseball to fathers and sons, marriage and sex and death. The actor’s second literary opus follows Theodore Lord Fenway Fullilove — Ted for short — a struggling New York writer who is weighed down not just by his beer gut but the heft of a hollow name, creating a veneer of expectation impossible to meet because he’s too busy shilling peanuts for a living at, wait for it, Yankee Stadium.

As a classic narcissist, one imagines Ted writes the way he talks: ironic, arrogant and packed so full of cursing, the words lose meaning. A pothead with a brain, he is too busy quoting Thomas Pynchon and Samuel Beckett to remember the last time he attracted a woman.

Imbued with the wonderment of Fox Mulder and the self-obsessed sleaze of Hank Moody, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the unlikeable Fullilove and the likeable Duchovny. Ted is, in his own words, “that quirky dude with a BA in English literature from Columbia who works as a peanut vendor in Yankee Stadium while he slaves away on the great American novel.” Meanwhile, Duchovny may not be in the concession business, but he is a two-time Ivy Leaguer.

Ted’s self- regard is tested when he encounters Mariana, a beautiful grief counselor he l abels a “death nurse” — an intellect’s manic pixie dream girl — who calls one day to inform him that his estranged father Marty is dying with cancer.

An anomalous devout Red Sox fan in New York ( hence his son’s name), Marty’s mental health relies on the steady rhythm of swings and misses, fouls and fly balls, as he dreams of the day his team reverses the curse and wins a World Series. As a Yankees fan, Ted finds this quirk of Marty’s to be insufferable when he decides to move home and help his father through his final days. ( It’s a quick and snappy choice, as most of the major ones in Bucky F* cking Dent are.) But whatever bones in Marty’s closet there are to pick, there is no longer any time, and so the two are simply “terminal together,” lapsing into passive aggressive humour, with Ted apologizing for being born, and Marty apologizing for being a lousy father, even though he “doesn’t really give a f *ck.”

However, Ted and Marty are more similar than they initially care to admit, both too proud to own their faults, but also too sensitive to imagine life without the other to argue with while sharing a beer or a blunt. In a moment that best captures their relationship, the two go for a swim at the local Y. Ted gets nervous removing his clothes in front of his father, but Marty has no problem bearing the angry red cancer scar on his chest. Suddenly, they wrap each other in a tight, naked hug, crying, when Marty informs Ted that he has a “perfectly respectable prick,” giving his son the praise he has long dreamed of — though perhaps not quite in the way he imagined.

Marty, weakened by cancer and regret, paints an increasingly innocent self-portrait in a journal Ted happens upon, and at first assumes is a novel, titled The Doublemint Man. Shocked by Marty’s impressive writing, the book serves for Ted as a “positive paternity test,” and Marty’s son, relieved, begins to realize he is more like his father than he imagined.

As Ted notices Marty’s health take a dip each time the Red Sox lose — which is often in the summer of 1978 — Ted devises a plan to trick him into believing the opposite. Using tapes of old games and rallying the local paperboy and bodega to cut the sports pages from the morning news, Ted convinces his father the Sox are in it to win it, and therefore, Marty can be, too. Until, of course, they make their way to Boston for the game where Bucky Dent decides to swing for the fences.

It’s in moments like this that Duchovny mercifully resists overwriting, giving the characters a much needed vulnerable authenticity. But these occurrences are so far and few between: the novel is so muffled by needless dialogue, with so much masturbatory pretension on the part of Ted, that it’s difficult to muster empathy.

“You write like you haven’t lived,” Ted recalls his agent once telling him. “You write well. About nothing. Your words are searching for a subject, looking around for something to hold on to, but they don’t find anything, only other words.” Bucky F*cking Dent is itself a novel with wasted potential, and would have been improved had Duchovny taken his own creation’s advice.

IT’S HARD NOT TO DRAW A PARALLEL BETWEEN FULLILOVE

AND DAVID DUCHOVNY.