What you’re reading only contains Parts One and Two of Comedy, or the Faustine Parable. While you’re working through this first half, I’ll be using the time to finish reviewing and revising Parts Three and Four.
I started writing this book about three years ago, initially to think through the different ways I moved with the men and women in my life. A deal with the devil seemed like the right narrative device to explore the implications of meeting the opposite sex on a more even field; that’s why at its core, this is a retelling of Goethe’s Faust. However, in the years since, life has been amusing enough to answer most of what I was asking back then, and that made the original question feel less urgent, less interesting to keep pulling at. The novel moved with me.
What it’s become is something considerably larger: a story about the comedic nature of a life spent running from misery, about what beauty means, about limerence, about what it costs to be an artist, and many more things still unfolding in Parts Three and Four.
Writing seven hundred pages takes a long time. In the years since I started, I’ve lived through a remarkable amount of heartbreaks and beautiful moments, both with real people and with characters in novels, and each one seemed to open up new territory I wanted to explore, or close off something I thought I understood. The manuscript went through several rewrites and adjustments, narrowing and expanding and then narrowing again. The book you’re holding is far less “educative” than the one I originally set out to write. Artists and writers I love taught me to value style over message, and that was the hardest lesson I’ve ever had to absorb. It took years to really sink in.
Comedy, or The Faustine Parable is the story of a person with big dreams and even bigger personal limitations. It’s made up of four parts, each following a specific period in the life of Andrew Davis, also known, by the time the story opens, as Faustine, world-famous artist and philanthropist.
I hope you enjoy reading it at least half as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. And if you’re someone close to me, if you’ve ever given me something emotionally significant in the past few years, be aware that part of you is likely somewhere in here.