Antkind by Charlie Kaufman

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman

I keep trying to explain this book to people. On its surface, it's simple. Film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg discovers a film that's three months long (including breaks for bathroom, meals, and sleep), stop-motion animation that took decades for its creator to complete—and it's the greatest film he's ever seen, it's going to make his career. Except, in a freak accident, the only copy is destroyed, and he must try to recreate it through hypnosis as his life falls apart.

Originally published: 2020
Acquired: December 2023
Read: January 2024

But that's barely it. Narrator B. is neurotic, prone to overthinking things in a way that reminds me of a lot of mid-to-late-century American literary fiction that I haven't actually read, like David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon. Every exchange is excruciatingly overthought. The book is full of weird sidebars and extended digressions, sideplots that seemingly have nothing to do with the book's ostensible main thrust, like B.'s romantic pursuit of a woman he meets at the hypnotist, his exchanging of apartments with a neighbor who does advertising videos for fast-food chain Slammy's, or B. being visited in his dreams by a "Brainio" filmmaker from the future who wants him to novelize her film before she makes it. And that barely scratches the surface.

On LibraryThing, Antkind has one one-star review and one five-star one, perhaps the epitome of "mixed." But the book is over seven hundred pages long, and I feel certain you cannot write a seven-hundred page novel that will please everyone. Even if a reader likes what it is doing, will they like it being done that much? It took me just over a week to read it, and I found that in each chunk of 80-90 pages, I found something to enjoy, even if much else that was happening was inscrutable or dull. Antkind could easily be pompous or dull or pretentious, but it's saved from such a fate by how funny it is. Kaufman is very frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious. There are a lot of good Trump jokes, but there's tons of fun stuff here.

Does it all add up? I am not so sure. Perhaps no seven-hundred-page novel does. Antkind surely is a foremost example of Henry James's "large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary." But I found a lot to like here even if I didn't always love it. Much like the film the novel ostensibly is about, Antkind cannot be described, only experienced, and any discussion of it can scratch the surface at best. Perhaps derivative, but enjoyable enough to be worth it.