Everything Is Good, my current novel-in-progress, was germinated about fifteen years ago, when I started contemplating what I called “God’s sense of humor.” To be clear, I don’t pretend to know what makes the Lord laugh (or even what “God” might mean in our world and time). I just wanted a name for a particular kind of humor—strange, dry and absurd. Laughter, tears, hysteria and astonishment are tangled together in a single brilliant flash. When we were teenagers we might have called it “acid humor.” Certain loopy parts of the Bible (especially the Book of Jonah) reveal God’s sense of humor. I detected God’s sense of humor in the insane life cycles of parasites and the brain-busting mathematics of infinity. Once I woke myself up out of a sound sleep by lifting my hands as I made air quotes in a dream; that might be ridiculous enough to qualify as God’s sense of humor.
Meanwhile, I was studying a set of novels which—though wildly diverse in theme and style—seemed to hold a hidden family resemblance. These books are genuinely and weirdly funny, but they also convey a deep philosophical vision, which can’t be separated from their humor. They provoke a laughter that is bitter, joyful, odd and unique—something much like God’s own sense of humor. Some examples: Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Ever since, I’ve wanted to try writing my own Profound Comic Novel. Finally, in 2020, I found my setting. I decided to follow a young American traveler, stumbling into the holy and embattled city of Jerusalem of the 1980s. My hero would be utterly naive, amnesiac in fact, a kind of hapless modern-day Jonah. I started filling notebooks with scenes, characters and ideas.
Five years later, I’m near the finish line.
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