Antkind

Antkind is the 2020 debut novel of American screenwriter and film director Charlie Kaufman.

Antkind
First edition cover (US)
AuthorCharlie Kaufman
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreAbsurdist fiction, comedy, satire
PublisherRandom House
Publication date
7 July 2020
Media typePrint
Pages720
ISBN978-0-399-58968-3

Synopsis

Neurotic failed white film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg stumbles upon what may be the greatest artistic achievement in human history: a three-month-long film, complete with scheduled sleeping, eating, and bathroom breaks, that took its reclusive auteur, a psychotic African-American man named Ingo Cutbirth, ninety years to complete. B makes it his mission to show it to the rest of humanity, the only problem: The film is destroyed when he stops for a soda, leaving just a single frame from which B must somehow attempt to recall the film that might just be the last great hope of civilization. The novel grows to encompass a vast array of concepts and plotlines.

B is obsessed with proving his leftist bonafides, boasting of his relationship with a Black sitcom star and his constant use of a strange non-binary pronoun "thon". His daughter is an estranged filmmaker whose work receives negative reviews from her father, who is himself obsessed with both ultra-obscure experimental films and the works of Judd Apatow. B's attempts to psychologically reconstruct the three-month movie send him to a wide variety of psychiatrists and hypnotists, most notably the sinister Barassini, whose work begins to have perverse effects on his body. He finds himself beginning to shrink in size, and is constantly falling down manholes. He becomes addicted to ketamine, and develops a clown fetish. At one point plastic surgery is conducted on him without his consent. He is forced at another point to pursue careers selling shoes at Zappos or working in a laundromat to impress a woman. His knowledge of film is seemingly deteriorating, as he constantly and surreally misquotes and misremembers many movies.

Several other plotlines concern the St. Augustine Monster, a war fought between android clones of Donald Trump and a fictitious fast food restaurant called Slammy's, a murder attempt by Abbott and Costello on a rival comedy team Mudd and Molloy, which is depicted in Cutbirth's film, and several forms of time travel, including by a precognitive meteorologist, clones of other characters (including Trump and a more financially successful B), and a virus invented by a sapient ant living in the distant future.[1][2][3]

Reception

Review aggregator Book Marks reports three negative and zero mixed reviews out of a total of 16 reviews, signifying that the book received a positive critical reception.[4]

Matthew Specktor writing for The New York Times praised the novel for its surrealism and humor, writing "It must be said that, by any standard — and even for someone who remembers the shock of Kaufman’s work when it was passed around Hollywood as unproduced samizdat in the 1990s — Antkind is an exceptionally strange book. It is also an exceptionally good one."[2] Anita Felicelli of the Los Angeles Review of Books praised Kaufman's storytelling calling it "a thrilling first novel trying to assume the form of consciousness itself, with all its digressions and delusions ... Antkind is Kaufman pushing himself to every formal and social limit, no holds barred, bleak and devastating, yet marvelous."[5] Chief film critic of The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote in a positive review "[Kaufman] may be someone for whom anxiety and sadness are a personal ordeal, but he transforms them into bleak, stark, unearthly monuments to comic despair."[6]

In a review for Slate, Laura Miller wrote "What at first appears to be a parody of the parasitical nature of criticism soon metastasizes into a grab bag of long-standing Kaufman motifs and themes...This proves a mixed blessing, as B himself is such a relentlessly broad caricature that he makes the cadaverous restaurant critic in Ratatouille seem nuanced."[7]

Accolades

The book was longlisted for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.[8]

References
  1. Canfield, David (22 November 2019). "Charlie Kaufman to publish debut novel about a failed film critic". Entertainment Weekly.
  2. Specktor, Matthew (8 July 2020). "In Charlie Kaufman's Novel, a Comic Hero Is Haunted by a Lost Film". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 July 2020.
  3. Sam, Leith (11 July 2020). "Charlie Kaufman: 'Making people laugh makes me feel validated as a human'". The Guardian.
  4. "Book Marks reviews of Antkind by Charlie Kaufman". Book Marks. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
  5. Felicelli, Anita (7 July 2020). "Strange Cosmic Entertainment: On Charlie Kaufman's "Antkind"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 26 July 2020.
  6. Bradshaw, Peter (25 July 2020). "Antkind by Charlie Kaufman review – a screenwriter's debut". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 July 2020.
  7. Miller, Laura (15 July 2020). "Charlie Kaufman's Debut Novel Reveals His Genius Has Its Limits". Slate. Retrieved 26 July 2020.
  8. "2020 First Novel Prize: The Long List". CentreForFiction.org. Retrieved 13 October 2020.
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