The Reservoir: A Novella

by David Duchovny

Overview

New paperback edition of The Reservoir from author, actor, and musician David Duchovny includes a bonus, brand-new short story, "The Scare Owl"

The Reservoir follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he looks back upon his life in his enforced quarantine solitude, wondering what it all means and who he really is.

Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is leads him on an epic quest that will ultimately tempt him with either delusional madness or the fulfillment of his own mythic fate.

Is he a dying man going mad or an everyman metamorphosing into a hero? Or both? We accompany Ridley as he leaves the safety of his apartment window to save the Fifth Avenue femme fatale and descends into a dangerous, increasingly surreal world of global conspiracies, madness, and sickness of this viral time. As Ridley's actions grow more and more uncharacteristic, he realizes the key to all the mysteries of now, and even all of history, seem to lie deep beneath the freezing waters of the reservoir.

The Reservoir is a twisted rom-com for our distanced time, when the merest touch could kill and conspiracy theories propagate like viruses—a contemporary union of Death in Venice, Rear Window, and The Plague. The paperback edition includes a bonus, brand-new short story, "The Scare Owl"!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636140452
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

DAVID DUCHOVNY is an award-winning actor, writer, director, New York Times best-selling author, and singer-songwriter. With an acting career spanning more than three decades, Duchovny is a two-time Golden Globe winner and four-time Emmy nominee. He is the author of four previous novels: Truly Like Lightning, Holy Cow, Bucky F*cking Dent, and Miss Subways. Duchovny adapted his novel Bucky F*cking Dent into a film he also directed, which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. As a musician, Duchovny has released three studio albums, Hell or Highwater, Every Third Thought, and Gestureland. The Reservoir is his most recent book.

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2022

Actor Duchovny (Truly Like Lightning) effortlessly brings readers inside the mind of a retired Wall Streeter struggling to find purpose during the Covid-19 pandemic. Ridley, home in his apartment overlooking Central Park, takes inspiration from the view. He becomes obsessed doing a photography project involving time-lapsed photos of the park’s reservoir, one for each night, believing his gesture amounts to “reaching out to the world, trying to say something with his eyes,” and hopes his effort will live on in posterity. This project changes 250 days in, when he examines a picture snapped the previous night, which seems to reveal a pattern, described by Duchovny as “a flashing of lights all the way across the park high up in an apartment building on Fifth Avenue.” Ridley reexamines the previous photos and notices what might be a secret message, possibly a cry for help in Morse code from a woman in distress. His curiosity leads him to leave his home sanctuary and venture outdoors, hoping to identify the building from which the flashes emanated and their mysterious sender. The unpredictable plot twists never overwhelm the depiction of a flawed, lonely guy trying to maintain sanity in the midst of a world on pause. This intelligent effort further burnishes Duchovny’s status as a gifted novelist. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Comically absurd, funny, and very dark."

New York Journal of Books

"A new, pandemic-inspired, Rear Window–esque thriller."

Village Voice

"[Duchovny's] novella The Reservoir, set in New York City, probes how pandemic isolation has changed us."

Boston Globe

"This beautiful fever dream of a novella put me in mind of Gabriel García Márquez because of its sense of romance—and humor—in the midst of calamity. I’ll never look at Central Park the same way."

Amanda Peet

"This swift and unnerving fever-dream of a novella, Duchovny’s fifth work of fiction, is saturated with mythic and literary allusions and shaped by resonant riffs on Poe and Mann. At once philosophical and suspenseful, grandly imaginative and sharply funny, this mind-bending story of delusion and longing is a dark reflection of New York’s countless crimes and tragedies and much-tested resilience, emblematic of the suffering and tenacity of all of humanity."

Booklist

"The progeny of our current pandemic is various: illness and death, of course, but also economic dislocation and personal isolation, the concept of ‘social distancing’ having quickly morphed from an advisory into a way of life. David Duchovny’s excellent new novella, The Reservoir, is a fever dream born out of this isolation."

Popmatters

"David Duchovny writes like Bob Dylan, but in prose. There’s irony, poetry, there’s social commentary. There’s a brooding outrage. And there’s romance, too. The complex, multilayered novella, The Reservoir . . . is an easy-to-read, hard-to-forget page-turner."

The Pavlovic Today

"A heartbreaking story of the cloaked complexities of father-daughter love framed as a sort of virtuoso suicide note. In its depiction of the breakthrough longings that come with growing older, it also struck me, wonderfully, as a contemporary Death in Venice."

Walter Kirn

"Equal parts Rear Window and The Plague, David Duchovny’s new novella is a wildly imaginative morality tale for these confounding times. With the Central Park Reservoir as his canvas, Duchovny paints a protagonist as quixotic as he is unreliable (or is he?). I had no idea where this story was headed, but I was down for the ride on every page"

From the Publisher

"David Duchovny’s existentialist novella is not to be missed. [The Reservoir] is a novel of many well-crafted and complex lines [and] Duchovny’s writing is a combination of high and low—and yes, that distinction still exists, if barely. His metaphors and similes are arresting . . . The Reservoir is an important novel for how it captures, not just where we are now, but where we are forever. Disease—like Covid, or like tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain—takes us on a journey outward and at the same time inward"

CityJournal

"In the former X-Files actor's fifth [book], a lonely ex-financier stuck in his apartment during the COVID-19 pandemic becomes obsessed with the Central Park Reservoir and slowly goes mad."

New York Times Book Review

"Bump [The Reservoir] to the top of your summer reading list immediately."

Culture Wag

"Biting and funny, The Reservoir is also deep and reflective. A mystery wrapped in a fever dream. A tale for our infectious times."

Chris Carter

07/01/2022

Duchovny has worn many hats—actor, director, songwriter—but writing was always his first love. This is his first novella, following four successful novels (including last year's Truly Like Lightning). Unremarkable Wall Street trader Ridley took a buyout in 2009, and 11 years later finds himself in isolation during the worst of the COVID pandemic. From his high-rise apartment overlooking New York's Central Park reservoir, he has plenty of time to reflect on his failed marriage and his troubled relationship with his daughter. As a distraction, he takes nighttime photos of the apartment building across the park. When he sees a series of flashing lights, he has a Rear Window moment, becoming obsessed with the idea that a woman is sending out distress signals, so he responds with his own flashing lights. When he gets no reply, his obsession takes him outside for the first time in months to follow the woman when she exits her building. These forays take Ridley deep into the Ramble, a perilous part of the park known after dark for anonymous hookups among gay people. As Ridley engages in ever more dangerous behavior, the distinction between fevered hallucinations and suicidal risk-taking becomes blurred. VERDICT Inspired by Duchovny's self-reflection while sequestered in his own aerie above Central Park at the height of the pandemic, this work is provocative, challenging, and not without its moments of dark humor.—Beth E. Andersen

Library Journal

2022-03-30
A wealthy New Yorker slips mentally off-kilter in this atmospheric yarn by the actor/writer.

Duchovny’s fifth work of fiction centers on Ridley, a former Wall Streeter who retired in middle age, giving him enough time to pursue banal art projects like a series of smartphone photos of the Central Park Reservoir taken from his high-rise window. Covid, which has recently arrived in the city, intensifies the divorced man’s isolation, which is also exacerbated by his contentious relationship with his daughter. As if to make up for her absence, he trains his gaze on a nearby apartment that he’s certain is occupied by a woman flashing distress signals. His ego swells: “He could star in his very own retrofitted-for-the-pandemic Rear Window. He could be her chivalrous knight, her Jimmy Stewart.” His derangement expands as he begins to follow the source of the signals into the park. A study of how internal concerns curdle into outward, tragic compulsions—particularly during an epidemic—the novel is a clear tribute to Thomas Mann’s classic Death in Venice; Duchovny cites it in the acknowledgments, quotes it in an epigraph, and introduces a homeless character wearing an army jacket labeled “Mann.” But Duchovny isn’t simply tracing over Mann’s plotlines and themes. Concerns about the distancing of technology, the shortcomings of the modern male ego, the fear of being out of touch, and the awkward push and pull of parenthood are all his own, and though the story is straightforward, it neatly captures Ridley’s slow decline in evocative, chilly prose that wouldn’t be out of place in a late Don DeLillo novel. Like his previous novels Bucking F*cking Dent (2016) and Miss Subways (2018), it’s a love letter to Duchovny’s native New York. But it’s also a smart story about obsession.

A slim, compelling tale of a man on the brink.

Kirkus Reviews