The tone of this book was not what I expected, nor did I really enjoy it. The writing also felt a little bloated, which made it difficult to fully dig into the story.

-- this read was quite a while back, as I received the arc during 2020 and was unable to review during 2020 due to the many, many issues of that year. Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for arc!

Laugh out loud funny, an absolute gem of a book. Has the same off the wall humor and feel as all of Kaufman's works.

Yeah, I liked this book. At times I hated it, but now that I am done. I can see that I actually liked it.

I hated B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. I hated B. Rosenberger Rosenberg with a passion. B. is the sort of person who works too hard to be holier-than-thou while genuinely believing that they are humble and empathetic and I just could not handle it. There are two reasons I kept reading. The first is that I love most of Kaufman's movies and I trusted that the journey would be worth it. (Even if B. Rosenberger Rosenberg--in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge way--disdains Kaufman and his oeuvre. The second is that it reminded me of Tom McCarthy's Remainder, a superior work (perhaps because of its comparative brevity) of another man obsessed with recreating a memory.

Antkind requires a full-on conscious commitment. Following the narrator through various iterations of the same assertions, through different realities (or are they?), is going to be outside of many readers' comfort zones. This reader has loved some of Kaufman's movies, but found this book to be an almost endless slog. It did finally end. That is, the reader finished the book. Recommend to the person who pushes you just one more time to read Infinite Jest.

I've tried and tried to finish this but now I concede- it's not gonna happen. I know many critics and readers enjoyed it but I got wound up and exhausted in the first 100 pages. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A rare pass.

​https://www.wsj.com/articles/charlie-kaufman-says-old-hollywood-not-netflix-killed-movies-11593781201

Link to Charlie Kaufman interview in The Wall Street Journal

Postmodern books are some of my favorites but stream of consciousness is the bane of my existence. I enjoyed this book, but it was an effort and the size felt unwarranted (I'm guessing that's the stream of consciousness talking). I love Kaufman, he's absolutely brilliant. I laughed out loud so many times. It's definitely a book to take your time with because it's worth it.

I appreciate having had an opportunity to read and review this book. The appeal of this particular book was not evident to me, and if I cannot file a generally positive review I prefer simply to advise the publisher to that effect and file no review at all.

Balaam Rosenberger Rosenberg is a writer or film critic or something. He goes by B. “so as not to wield my maleness as a weapon”. He has an African American girlfriend, as he tells us about a thousand times. I assume this is meant to be ironical. He meets Ingo Cutbirth, an “ancient, reclusive, eccentric, likely psychotic African American filmmaker“ who has created an animated film that takes three months to watch (including bathroom breaks). It is undoubtedly a masterpiece which Rosenberg is destined to introduce to the world, until he unfortunately destroys it.

I knew from the first chapter that I would not be able to finish this book. The writing style was not for me. I recognize how some readers will see this as a string of clever observations. Unfortunately, I see it as stream of consciousness babble that repetitively goes on for over 700 pages. The author also takes occasional shots at filmmakers he deems beneath him: “...backdraft (also a dismal movie, by the way, directed by Ronson Howard, which somehow manages to make fighting fires both tedious and inexplicably colorless).

This is the second book I tried this week in which the protagonist/author just spent too damned much time thinking about himself. In each case, the author actually mentioned himself in the book. “ had [Charlie] Kaufman written this film, it would have been a laundry list of ‘clever’ ideas, culminating in some unearned emotional brutality and a chain reaction of recursional activity wherein it is revealed that the author has an author who has an author who has an author who has an author, et cetera, thus leaving the audience depleted, depressed, and, most egregiously, cheated. What Kaufman does not understand is that such ‘high concepts’ are not an end in themselves but an opportunity to explore actual mundane human issues. Kaufman is a monster, plain and simple, but a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude....”. Amazingly, each book also had doppelgängers.

I’m sure there is an appreciative audience for this book (maybe cineastes), but it’s not me. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

There really aren't the right words to explain what I think about this ambitious, outrageous, LONG, absurd, brilliantly written novel. It's twisty, it's clever, and I couldn't put it down even when I had no real sense that the book was actually going somewhere. B. is the ultimate unreliable/dubious narrator, a film critic to top all critics and I had no end of chuckles every time he ripped into a Charlie Kaufman film. This is a book that will remain in memory for a very long time (ironic given the subject matter of the forgotten movie), and definitely ranks up there with some of the best books I've read. Highly recommend, especially if you are a film lover.

Thanks, NetGalley and Random House for the read.

If you are familiar with Charlie Kaufman’s films, then you will not be surprised that his first novel, Antkind (Random House, 2020), weighs in at a maximalist 720 pages, nor that it centrally concerns identity and memory. In Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa, and as the screenwriter of, among other films, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, Kaufman has given us inventive and metafictional plots with iconic characters in the neurotic throes of identity crises. In Synecdoche, New York, the playwright Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) tries to capture the entirety of not just his life, but Life, on a stage that grows, recursively, to fill multiple impossibly huge warehouses. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) erase the memories of their failed relationship only to repeat it. In Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) struggles to adapt “great, sprawling New Yorker stuff” into a true but also compelling story, writing himself into it.
Antkind repeats many of these motifs. Its narrator is the self-important but utterly marginal critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, who scrapes together a bare living teaching film studies at the Howie Sherman Zoo Worker Institute in Upper Manhattan. Meanwhile his work, probably read by no one, is published by his Harvard roommate, “who has the distinction of being the only film journal editor to have been exonerated for fifteen brutal murders, in fifteen separate trials.” At every opportunity, B. pompously reminds us that he went to Harvard, of the superiority of his knowledge (even then) to that of his film professors, and of the countless other ridiculous areas he supposedly minored in: horror vacui studies, upholstering, relativistic time studies, number of the beast studies, graphology, chronology, etc.
The novel opens on B.’s trip to the St. Augustine Society for the Preservation of St. Augustine Film History (look away if you are not interested in jokes based on pedantic repetitions) to research yet another absurdly titled monograph. While there, he discovers a three-month-long stop-motion film that took Ingo Cutbirth, a black artist, some ninety years to make, and which Ingo has shown no one. Like the posthumously famous Henry Darger, Ingo is an outsider artist (someone with no official training or institutional credentials), who, also like Darger, supported himself as a janitor, while lovingly laboring on his art in secret.
Ingo’s film is a kind of history of comedy featuring various competing Laurel and Hardy-esque duos, but what it is really about is the erasure of black experience. In addition to the thousands of white puppets featured in the film, Ingo has made thousands more black ones and animated them, off-screen and unseen:
“They’re in the movie?”
“They’re unseen in the movie.”
“So then they’re not in the movie?”
“They’re in it. But the camera is facing away from them. As it is for most of us.”
“So it’s more or less a conceptual notion.”
“No. The puppets have been built. With as much care as the seen puppets. They have been posed movement by movement, just as have the seen puppets. They have lived their lives. But have not been witnessed by the camera. Only by me.”
Imagined as an actual work of art, it is hard to see how Ingo’s film could succeed. Since the camera has always faced away from the black puppets, a viewer could be made to consider them and the forgotten lives they represent only via a clumsily didactic curatorial apparatus outside the film itself. Imagine it playing on a loop in a darkened gallery space, marked by a placard at the door: As you watch a few random minutes of this three-month-long film, think about the black puppets you don’t see. It seems like the kind of work that one could admire only in an abstract way. Of course, fictional works of art shouldn’t be judged by the same standards as real ones and Kaufman’s metafictional nesting of Ingo’s film within his own novel brilliantly solves these problems. Ingo can describe his process to B. (and thus us) and B. can report his enchanted viewing and meditate on its meaning, drawing our attention within the normal narration of the story to what artistic practice has historically passed over.
Ingo begins screening the film for B., interrupting its three-month runtime with carefully scheduled food, bathroom, and sleep breaks, but Ingo succumbs to old age midway, leaving B. to finish watching on his own. B. holds that “any film of substance, to be properly understood, must be viewed at least seven times….” The details of B.’s method capture his pomposity, satirize the combination of pedantry and arbitrariness of so much academic theory, and mock the idea that absolutely everything is culturally constructed: “The first viewing is to be accomplished utilizing only the right hemisphere, the so-called intuitive brain center…. This go-through I refer to as the Nameless Ape Experience.” This is followed by a viewing in which B. asks, “How is this movie about me? …This is perhaps the most essential viewing.” Next, “Step Three is how. Here is where I tap into my vast filmic knowledge.” The film is then viewed backwards to break up familiar narrative meaning, and upside down because “We as Americans take gravity for granted, I think you’ll agree.” Then it is viewed “to cement my reaction and to establish the film’s ranking—if any—on my many lists,” while the final and “seventh step is to not watch the film.”
Before he can employ his method in full, however, B. makes the mistake of transporting the fragile filmstock back to New York in a hot trailer. It goes up in flames and he thereby loses not only his chance to study it but also most of his memory of the first viewing, due to burns and other injuries. When he wakes from a medically induced coma, he is no longer certain that Ingo was black rather than Swedish and white, and some doubts are cast if the film ever existed at all, his coma having been three months long. These uncertainties begin to draw our attention away from Ingo and his film and toward B., raising the worry that he—and perhaps Kaufman—is repeating the same erasure of black experience that the film is about, replacing it with his own creation. B. sets off on a journey to remember the film in full frame-by-frame detail: “My obligation is to the brilliance of it. That film changed me.” He also—and this is certainly not the least of his tasks from his own perspective—wants to secure his own place in film history and rightful status as a leading critic on the coattails of the film’s legacy: “I cannot help but let my mind wander to the future adulation I will perhaps receive, the lectures, the Nobel for Criticism, the Pulitzer for Profound Insight. I am energized in entirely new ways.”
While it is not surprising that Antkind is about identity—and ego—it is unexpected the extent to which it is about identity politics. Kaufman’s films have all centered on white men, and offered only the barest of gestures at the worry that their condition is not a universal one. Those who care about identity politics point out how our institutions, practices, and ways of speaking—down to the level of pronoun usage—falsely generalize from the perspective of those in power while ignoring or dismissing the experience of others. B. is hyperconscious of contemporary conventions of race and gender, publishing under his initial alone to block any assumptions about his ideas, and holding forth at length on—and inserting everywhere, even when thoroughly unnecessary—his preferred singular genderless pronoun, “thon.” Once in this fraught territory, Kaufman avoids placing his narrator on either side of our current cultural divide, whether for the purposes of straightforwardly satirizing one or of criticizing the other. B. is neither a reactionary nor genuinely enlightened, evolved, or woke (in his own varying vocabulary). Instead, he is a version of one of David Foster Wallace’s hideous men, portrayed at much greater length. He performs his hyperconsciousness of progressive mores, which place him—in theory—on one side of our current culture wars, but—in practice—he is on the other side. He is oblivious of his own failure to really live by his avowed ideals: treating women terribly, endlessly bragging that he is dating an African American woman, skittish of the word “black” to the extent that he misdescribes people from Africa as African American, and reminding everyone he encounters that he is not Jewish so often that one finally can’t but read the tic as anti-Semitic. In the words of another character, uttered to B.’s face, he is “this bizarre combination of obsequious and blowhard.” Like Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, enjoyment of Antkind depends on whether one finds such satire funny and insightful of a very specific kind of toxic masculinity, or instead just feels like one is being forced to spend time with a deeply unpleasant person. Kaufman’s target is neither progressives nor conservatives, but rather the kind of pompous and bumbling academic who thinks he is fighting the good fight, while in reality he is hurting the cause.
In a telling moment early in the novel, a kind of artist statement from Ingo’s notebooks is quoted at length:
We are hidden away. Not just the Negro, but the insane, the infirm, the destitute, the vile, the criminal. We are housed in slums, in jails, in institutions, in hobo jungles. We are all of us hidden from view, leaving only the comedy of whiteness to be seen. My goal is to hold up a mirror to society, but a mirror can only see what can be seen. My camera is such a mirror, but that doesn’t mean the Unseen ceases to exist. It is simply hidden away from the camera lens. And so I shall animate the Unseen as well, all the lives that come and go unnoticed. I shall animate them, remember them, but not record them. And as such my camera shall be the truest of mirrors and this film shall reflect the world as no other.
B.’s narratorial response after reading this is: “I close the notebook and sit in silence for a long while,” at first suggesting that he has found this to be moving. But then he continues: “These incoherent ramblings will be hard to decipher.” Instead of focusing on Ingo’s film, Antkind focuses on B.’s reception of it—conveying his respect for it, but spending far more time and energy mocking his own confusions and projections, which are legion. Kaufman’s satire is not leveled from a place of certainty; he does not criticize B.’s missteps by clearly implying what he should have done instead. Rather, Kaufman’s satire is broad and unstable, undercutting B. from all sides—a good artistic approach for multiplying jokes but not for offering ethical insight. The novel makes abundantly clear how viciously B. navigates the world, but leaves it hard to determine what it would mean for someone like him to proceed virtuously—or if this is even possible. If everything B. says is ridiculed, one might conclude that the best he could do is remain silent. But even as he is mercilessly mocked, B. is clearly a stand-in for Kaufman himself, so this issue recurs one frame outward: what can Kaufman offer through his art that others aren’t in a better position to understand and represent? Why a novel, and one on this topic specifically, instead of silence? Kaufman’s metafictional approach is not as anxiously aware of these worries as one might expect.
The decision to focus Antkind so much more on its blowhard narrator than Ingo’s film about the Unseen seems a comment on the situation of artists in our times—or, more specifically, the situation of white, male (cis-gendered, well-educated, wealthy, etc.) artists. Had he portrayed a black outsider artist at the center of his novel, it is hard to imagine charges of cultural appropriation not being leveled at this white and well-established filmmaker. So instead our access as readers to Ingo and his project is almost entirely through B.’s skewed memories. This framing seems to make B. a representative of the difficulties that some white male artists feel they face today. On the one hand, they cannot continue to ignore, as so many of them for so long have, the place of people different from themselves in the world. On the other hand, our culture increasingly holds that they have no right to represent the experience of others across differences of race and gender. No one was interested in B.’s own early films, but they aren’t interested in his monographs on marginalized filmmakers either. Some would suggest these difficulties are well-deserved and white male artists should try listening for a change.
But artists want to express themselves, and the route which Antkind takes, attempting to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of false universality and cultural appropriation, is for the artist to focus on his own white male experience of others unlike himself, constantly undercutting the validity of his own experience, while maintaining deference to that of marginalized others. But this is not a route to understanding difference; rather, its very form is that of presenting various misunderstandings of others. The main aim of the novel is always to satirize B., and only secondarily to give us sincere glimpses of Ingo’s richer work. Such an approach, perhaps purposefully, makes it hard to discern what Kaufman himself thinks behind his unreliable narrator. In a didactic moment, however, the novel suggests one possible endpoint of identity politics and art, perhaps with Instagram added to the mix: “There is, I have heard, one film currently playing, quite well-reviewed, I am told, consisting entirely of a young person of indeterminate gender screaming, ‘Look at me!’ at the camera over and over for ninety minutes.” A newspaper describes it as “the quintessential coming-of-age story for our times.” Whereas Ingo’s film and his notion of the Unseen is honored, this passing example is clearly derided.
Antkind grants a substantial number of pages to our culture’s most bumbling and self-regarding (though, unlike B., neither academic nor hyperconscious) white male, Donald Trump. Trump’s mindset is an exact inversion, and so counterpoint, of the artistic strategy sketched above: instead of undercutting his own standpoint and honoring others, he cleaves to his own experience, no matter how limited it might be, at the expense of all difference. Though it doesn’t suggest how white males should behave in today’s culture, the novel’s portrayal of Trump makes clear that it isn’t recommending a return to a time when they blithely pretended their experience was universal. In a memorable and hilarious set-piece, Trump falls in love with an animatronic version of himself from the Hall of Presidents: “They pull off the sheet and I’m staring at me. A life-size me doll. It’s very good. Really impressive. […] I touch it. The face is very soft. Probably as soft as my face, which is very soft, let me tell you. I have always had the best skin. Soft to the touch. Not soft in a female way. But in a way that many, many women have complimented me.” Trump, who “can’t stop staring at the doll of me” and “can’t stop touching it,” orders Disney to make one for himself, and it eventually supplants him. Kaufman would have been better off leaving things there; instead, Trump comes to occupy an ever-larger, if diffuse, place in the novel’s background, going to war with a burger-chain-turned-political-regime, and eventually leaving the earth habitable only for ants.
The meaning of the novel’s title remains unclear to me, unless it is meant to contrast ants’ lack of individuality against our obsession with it—but even there the novel focuses on one hyperintelligent ant in the future. Hypnosis, clones, and time travel also occupy places in the increasingly convoluted plot as it shuttles between B.’s dreams and reality, and his true and false memories. Often, the complexities of the novel’s plot do not seem particularly meaningful, but rather instead demonstrative of Kaufman’s willingness to reach for anything and everything that might yield a joke. Like many metafictionalists, he builds an awareness of some possible critiques of his work into it, noting that no one would be interested in a lengthy reconstructed description of a film, even though that’s exactly what significant stretches of the novel are. He is also well aware of the often seemingly random plotting of the story: “I wake up with a start. It occurs to me that both in my dreams and in my waking life there exists the same question: What now? Something happens or nothing happens, and either way, I have to decide what to do next. There is no end to it. Well, no, there is one end to it, and that revelation leads me to this conclusion: ‘What now?’ is the definition of life.”
At its best, Antkind extends the absurd and slapstick comic tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and Donald Antrim. Written in the wake of this self-conscious, postmodern tradition, perhaps the best recent comparisons are Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity and Lost Empress, in both their strengths and weaknesses: often hilarious, but unevenly plotted and in need of a heavier editorial hand. A small set of jokes recurs throughout Antkind. Kaufman has his narrator mock his (Kaufman’s) films, but the joke grows tiresome when each one is individually named and sent up. Whereas B. rails against Kaufman, he celebrates Judd Apatow as the unsung cinematic master of our times in another repeated joke. (It is less clear how to interpret his disdain for Christopher Nolan and praise of Wes Anderson.) The novel is filled as well with comedic routines from the warring duos in B.’s memories—some seemingly accurate, others obviously false—of Ingo’s film.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Antkind is that, even though many of its jokes do land, it is so laboriously played for laughs alone. For better or worse, ours is a cultural moment in which people care deeply about the politics of identity. In its fundamental tone, the novel makes no effort to engage with these feelings, suggesting that such matters are to be laughed about, perhaps even at. Taking this approach, the novel brings into focus some of the convoluted knots of culture and politics that define our current moment, but cannot even begin to offer any insight into how we might untangle them. Kaufman’s best work—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York—achieves a pathos that this novel rarely aims for. Joel and Clementine stand in the hallway and agree to try again, even as they know they will come to hate each other again. Caden makes his way, directed by earpiece, through the ruins of his life’s work, is told to die, and complies. In contrast, B. repeatedly falls into open manholes, or “personholes,” as he is quick to correct himself. One would welcome further novelistic efforts from Kaufman that distill the comedy of Antkind, but, as in his best screenplays, layer it with more carefully controlled plotting and lasting emotion as well. At the end of the novel, meditating on the possibility of playing the film of life backward, “watching the world fold instead of unfold,” evolve instead of devolve, B. is just about to achieve real feeling, but then falls down yet another hole instead.

Charlie Kaufman is a visionary in his treatment of our complex, collective 21st century ennui. His films have been the narrative backbone of my entire creative life, beginning with the incomparable Being John Malkovitch released as I graduated high school, just as the writer’s ink on my chest growing in little inky sprouts of energy and electricity. Adaptation changed the game again, as did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Anomalisa. And while these are all incredible works of art, unparalleled in vision and structure, Synecdoche, New York is simply one of the greatest, most convoluted and fantastic of his efforts as a writer and director – and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance is just as once-in-a-lifetime as the film itself. Kaufman knows how to hold a mirror up to the human condition and the complexity of creating art and breathing and relationships. Alongside Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michel Gondry, Spike Lee, and sometimes regrettably, Quentin Tarantino and Lars Von Trier, I feel like we are living in an incredible time of impeccable cinematic philosophy that is unmatched in talent, scope, and introspection. Plainly, I respect the hell out of Kaufman’s work and consider him one of the living best, so of course, I was very, very excited for Antkind even though I didn’t even know it existed until a few weeks before its release thanks to our strange COVID existence.

I am going to have a difficult time encapsulating everything that is amazing about this book – as all amazing books tend to do. If you love cinema, you will love Antkind. If you love comedy, you will love Antkind. If you love philosophy, you will love Antkind. If you love Kaufman and would love a neurotic Kaufman on Kaufman, well beyond the bounds of (and definitely including) Adaptation, you will love Antkind. If you love a book that seemingly blurs genres: between academic study, Ignatius J. Reilly narration, science fiction, existential examination, humanistic religious essay, and pure laugh-out-loud comedic genius, this book will ensure many hours of entertainment and a dip-in-anywhere-and-go rereadability.

Antkind tells the story of R. Rosenberger Rosenberg (mostly), a film critic who is definitely not Jewish and wants you to know that along with the fact that his girlfriend is African American, as he is entrusted with reviewing a three-month-long film that took the writer-director his entire life to film. I am not giving away much when I tell you that there is only one copy, it is printed on nitrate stock, and Rosenberg is a bumbling unlikable idiot who burns it all up in an accident. There is one frame that survives, and through a series of stories-within-stories that are shown through a variety of hypnotherapy sessions that turn into side-first-person-narratives, his goal is not only to review it, but entirely recreate it from memory.

What happens over the following 650 pages is unlike anything I have ever experienced in a novel.

Kaufman takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey that is perhaps closest to experiencing one of my favorite authors Kurt Vonnegut (who is mentioned and nodded to in a variety of sendups in the novel). We are introduced to a cast of characters that bring us through not only the recreation of the film itself, but through the nature of film, identity, humanity, consciousness, the unreliability and dynamism of memory even when it is recorded on a medium such as film. Kaufman explores our government for the past century and today, Disney and its ilk, and many, many other stories that build into what I can only describe as a full orchestra playing a symphony of a novel. In fact, I can easily describe it as the indescribable characteristic explosion that is what a Charlie Kaufman film is. The medium of a novel, however, allows him to move more freely than he ever has before - not only referencing himself and his craft, but stretch his wings even further to not only tickle the keys of the form, but blow it completely out of the universe of what we expect from a novel.

There is a lot of writers honored in this book, and Kaufman is well aware that he is standing on the shoulders of giants in jumping into the literary world. I already mentioned Kurt Vonnegut, of course, but he also honors Plato – most notably a thread throughout the book that not only symbolizes but at one point directly references the allegory of the caves, and many, many other authors. He discusses the politics of our day that dedicates an army of “President Trunk” automatons to infiltrate every corner of our country and culture with varying levels of Multiplicity-derivative success. Identity and Gender are a constant motif throughout the novel as the narrator has an obsession with identity and gender, what it means, how its referenced, and how fluid it is as it changes through time and space. And early cinema is a constant throwback in this book, and it is combined with self-referential nods and callbacks to the buffer between radio and film with Abbott and Costello... and their clones.... and their murderous clones.

Ultimately, this is one of my favorite novels of the decade and one of my favorite novels of all time. It has everything I love in a great postmodern book, upending all expectations and leading the audience into a world that is completely unrecognizable from our own. Not in fantasy, but in a way that allows us to revisit the familiar in an unfamiliar fashion. The novel zooms in on many of my interests, from great writing, to narrative complexity, to modern and historical politics, to an intricate study of time and space and gender without making many leading comments about any of them, to film, to religion, to existence as a human, to existence as a living being, to the unwritten future, to nostalgia, to Charlie Kaufman himself. This is a perfect novel. While it is long, it is the perfect length for revisiting quotes, paragraphs, portions, and chapters as they are all incredibly short, numbering in the nineties.

I enjoyed every moment with this book. Every word. Every sentence. And my dear and patient lover had to listen to me spout off every portion that made me laugh out loud. Catherine laughed as well, and that is a testament to how brilliant the book is from beginning to end. I look forward to revisiting its pages again, and again, and again, and I look forward to when my favorite director-novelist brings me more art that enriches my existence as a skeleton that might be worthy of worship by the Antkind of the future.

This wasn't for me. I'm a big fan of Kaufman's film work - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my all-time favorite movies, but this was just a rambling mess that seemed to go on for ages. Far too long.

Charlie Kaufman is a screenwriter known for his iconic writing style in films like Being John Malcovich and Adaptation. This book is not a novel, its more like a stream of consciousness rant by a very neurotic obsessive person with no sense of boundaries. You will either find him funny or very tedious. Either way there are 700 pages of unedited Charlie Kaufman.

Oof. I love Charlie Kaufman's movies, and I was very much looking forward to seeing what kind of surrealism he might get up to without the limitations of a studio or having to convince financial backers. But I've done my best with it, and I just can't see finishing it. I understand that the narrator's voice is meant to be comic, but the deliberate, over-the-top sexism and racism and self-absorption and self-importance just feel so out of place with everything that's going on politically and socially at the moment, and it feels so redundant and circular listening to him go on and on about how much cachet his Black girlfriend gives him and how he, as a cis man, is the truest victim of everything from sexism to transphobia. This is just not for me.

This book made me question my sanity multiple times while reading it, and that’s a compliment of the highest order. Admittedly I’m still working through it but this is a dense work that rewards patience.

**Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for the ARC**

Something I’ve learned in a decade or so of book reviews: Even when you think you know, you don’t always know.

Take “Antkind,” the debut novel from acclaimed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, for example. As someone familiar with Kaufman’s body of work – his style, his sensibility, his thematic interests – I figured I had a pretty good grasp on what I was getting into when I picked up his first work of literary fiction.

Reader, I did not.

Kaufman’s creative output is fluid, an elaborate and evocative liquid that takes the shape of whatever container it is placed into. Movies have strict delineations – there are unavoidable limitations of time and technology – and hence Kaufman’s work in that sphere is likewise limited. But on the page, there are no such limit. In that regard, “Antkind” is Kaufman unleashed, his careening creative brilliance utterly unfettered.

It’s … a lot.

This book is a sprawling, recursive metanarrative, one unbound by literary convention. It is the story of what happens when mediocrity is confronted with genius and forced to reckon with what happens when singular brilliance proves ephemeral. It is about a man in whom self-regard and self-pity do constant battle, forced to come to terms with how little he understands. It is about what it means to be tangentially touched by greatness, only to have that greatness escape your grasp.

B. Rosenberger Rosenberg is a film critic. A neurotic, underappreciated and not particularly well-regarded film critic, but a film critic nevertheless. He is dismissive of the mainstream, preferring to focus on the brilliance he perceives in the obscure. He writes excessively titled monographs and fails to make any sort of academic inroads.

But his life changes when he inadvertently stumbles onto Ingo Cutbirth. You see, Cutbirth is the ultimate outsider artist, a longtime janitor who has devoted his entire life to making a film. It is a work of staggering ambition, a work of stop-motion animation that he spent decades making and that will take three months (with scheduled breaks for sleep, food and the restroom) to watch. When Cutbirth asks B. to watch the film, the critic haughtily agrees, assuming the worst.

Instead, it proves to be the greatest film he has ever seen. Indeed, it may be the greatest work of cinematic art ever created. Finally, B. has discovered his true purpose – he must devote his life to making sure the world sees this masterpiece. He sets out to do just that, only to almost immediately be faced with disaster.

The film is destroyed.

B. is left with nothing but a single frame of film and his memory of what he saw. From this, he must try and reconstruct a film that could perhaps be not just a work of art, but the very salvation of humanity.

What follows is a descent into madness, a swirling maelstrom of metatextual chaos. We’re dealing with the epitomic unreliable narrator, one whose own emotional and intellectual idiosyncrasies are deeply entangled with the sporadic memories of the film that he is trying to excavate from his subconscious. As chunks of the movie become snarled with his own perception, the lines blur. Truth – already subjective and colored by his own pretensions – becomes ever more difficult to discern. The man is swallowed up by a yawning abyss of weirdness … and we’re just along for the ride.

We’re talking murderous vaudeville teams and robot presidents run amok and ever-shifting fetishes and a proclivity for falling down open manholes. No notable film figure’s names are quite right, save for Judd Apatow (the only good American filmmaker, in B’s opinion) and Charlie Kaufman (the absolute worst person in the history of cinema).

Like I said – it’s a LOT.

I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite like “Antkind.” The easiest way to describe it is that it is precisely the sort of novel you would expect Charlie Kaufman to write. It could be compared do the weirder fictional digressions of David Foster Wallace or the see-what-sticks postmodernism of someone like Mark Leyner. When things get cooking, there’s a pretty strong Pynchon vibe (if you tilt your head and squint a little). The highbrow/lowbrow referential ping-ponging, the blending of tragedy and absurdity, tangents begetting tangents begetting tangents – it’s a real workout.

In truth, there’s literally nothing straightforward about this book. Every aspect of it – the prose style, the character choices, the narrative direction – is layered and stratified. Ideas are taken out of the box and kicked around before being abandoned. Subplots meander off into the sunset, never to be seen again. In “Antkind,” reality is a construct and memory is a lie – both figuratively and literally.

It’s a challenging read, to be sure. Kaufman is unapologetic in the demands he places on the reader. The pace is wildly varied, moving at breakneck speed at certain points and slowing to a crawl in others. The voice of our narrator is whinging and wheedling, built upon seemingly oppositional feelings of superiority and victimhood. The real is presented as fictional and the fictional as real – except when it’s the other way around.

At 720 pages, it’s a real doorstopper of a novel – yet another shared quality with some of its PoMo forbears. It has a similar density as well, packed tightly with reference upon metareference upon meta-metareference. And yet, even with all that, “Antkind” is extremely readable; one imagines that Kaufman channeled his experiences with making the bizarre accessible on the big screen to make it so.

“Antkind” will not be everyone’s cup of tea. At times, it is willfully obtuse and gleefully off-putting. But there’s a vividity and viscerality to it that will prove irresistible to a certain kind of reader. It is tightly layered and unflinchingly weird, a book that sets the subconscious churning. You’ll have to put in the work, but if you do, you will be richly rewarded.

The publicist for Chicago Humanities Festival is sending my article to the publisher. I did not review the book. I used it as a resource for an article about a livestreamed conversation with the author. Here's a link to my article.

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https://thirdcoastreview.com/2020/07/18/conversations-two-screenwriters-talk-about-their-new-novels-utopia-avenue-and-antkind/

I DIDN'T REVIEW THE BOOK SO THE STAR RATING IS NOT VALID.

This book received a lot of hype before it was released. I thought the premise sounded interesting and captivating, but it was a challenging read and I was unable to finish it. It's received fantastic reviews, but it just wasn't for me.

Thanks to Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This novel is so crammed full of ideas, that at times I had to set it down, chew on a few things, then pick it back up at a later date. To me, that isn't a bad thing. In fact, I enjoyed my long relationship with this book and found it hard to deal with when it came to an end.

B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, the antagonist of this novel, is such a self important, faux intellectual know-it all, that he's easy to laugh at, but since more and more people seem to suffer from the same affliction in real life, the laughs felt a little acidic on my tongue. If you are Kaufman fan, think more Synecdoche, New York than Being John Malkovich. It's great to experience a Kaufman creation that isn't bound by the limits of budgets and studio notes. B. Rosenberg Rosenberg would hate it, but I loved it.