Roxanne is a retelling of Edmond Rostand’s popular 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac, itself a fanciful version of the life of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), a real person and early instance of that paradigmatic literary figure, the libertine. The libertine, recognizable since the seventeenth century, if not before, is usually thought to be a symptom of the emergence of democracy in France. This character hates society’s laws and loves the roiling dynamics of nature. Not content to acquiesce to the supposedly civilizing influence of Christian systems for the orderly reproduction of humanity (marriage, chastity, prohibition of crime), the libertine transgresses in the service of freedom—a freedom the libertine believes is perfectly natural and therefore good.

Cyrano is less overtly sexual and violent in his fictions than his eighteenth-century inheritors—Choderlos de Laclos, the Marquis de Sade, Crébillon fils, et al. A guy who wrote under a pseudonym, i.e., a shortened version of his own name, he poked fun at a degenerate aristocracy, adored the picaresque mode. His libertine tales are designed to convince readers of the beauty of intellectual and social independence; atheism, too, perhaps. He was an early science fiction writer and legendary with a sword. His best-known novel, Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, an autofictional account of travels to outer space, is said to have influenced Jonathan Swift. It was published two years after his death.

As I was saying, when I began writing this novel, I thought of him or, rather, sort of thought of him. I thought of the fictional Cyrano invented by Rostand and of his need for a proxy to speak words of love, all of which I managed to associate with Steve Martin. But I wasn’t thinking about love, exactly, or, for that matter, Steve Martin. I was really only thinking about the proxy part of the situation, about writing, about a world in which it might be convenient not just to have such a proxy, but to be that proxy. That is the world I have created in Loudermilk, in which a proxy is not an accessory to a comedic plot resulting in happy marriage but rather the main event, the hollow hero we can’t look away from, though in truth we know little enough about him.

Loudermilk is a libertine. That much I can tell you. We encounter him during the academic year that leads up to the Swift Boat controversy of summer 2004, a mythological ruse that seems either to have altered American politics forever or to be the symptom of some other transformative event more difficult to name. This gambit followed, as we know, on the heels of a war waged to rid a foreign nation of a three-letter acronym.