lightning people text by T. COLE RACHEL portrait by ALEXIS DAHAN Having been a journalist, critic, and full-time editor, first at V and then at Interview magazine, Christopher Bollen has just published his first novel. He is a canny arbiter of the very culture that informs Lightning People’s lives and loves. Between the requisite gallery openings and dinners he spent “most of my nights and every weekend for five years” writing his tale about Joseph Guiteau, a character who is the same age and lives in the same city as Bollen. “And I smoked way too many cigarettes doing it.” Bollen’s debut novel, Lightning People, tells the story of Joseph Guiteau, a 35-year-old actor from Ohio with a complicated family history working in New York City around the time of 9/11. Guiteau is newly married to a Greek woman, one with a tenuous work permit. As the couple’s life,…