Antkind

Starred review from March 1, 2020
Always centrifugal screenwriter Kaufman delivers a terrific debut novel that makes Gravity's Rainbow read like a Dr. Seuss story. You know you're in for strange times when a young fast-food cashier cites an anecdote about Jean Cocteau ("They once asked him what he would take from a burning house") while offhandedly observing that the vehicle you're driving is on fire. So it is with B. (for Balaam) Rosenberg, a film historian who, visiting Florida, falls in with a curious African American man of impossibly old age. That swampy state is the setting for Kaufman's screenplay Adaptation, mysterious, humid, full of weird critters, just as we find it in the opening pages of Kaufman's shaggy ant story. (As for the ants, once our strange kind does itself in, they'll remain: "Only ants now. And fungus." But that's long in the future, as time begins to reverse itself like a film reel being rewound.) Rosenberg, who insists throughout that he's not Jewish, finds and loses a film that our Methuselah has been making for 90 years and that takes three months to view. It's Rosenberg's brief to reconstruct the thing via a single remaining frame and a weird hypnotist. Back in New York, he wows an HR rep and lands a job at an online shoe-delivery company, which lands him in the clown-shoe business, which leads to impure thoughts ("I picture her naked but with clown makeup on, and instantly I realize a new fetish has been born") and eventually his dismissal from said conglomerate. He also falls in with a certain Donald Trump--beg pardon, Trunk, as obnoxious in robotic as in human form. Inside jokes abound, with digs at the likes of Judd Apatow, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson, along with a ringing denunciation of one Charlie Kaufman ("a poseur of the most odious sort"). It's a splendid, spectacular mess, much like Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, commanding attention from start to finish for its ingenuity and narrative dazzle. Film, speculative fiction, and outright eccentricity collide in a wonderfully inventive yarn--and a masterwork of postmodern storytelling.

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Starred review from March 30, 2020
Screenwriter/director Kaufman’s debut brims with screwball satire and provocative reflections on how art shapes people’s perception of the world. While visiting St. Augustine, Fla., to research a book, B. Rosenberg, a pretentious film historian and critic, crosses paths with Ingo Cutbirth, an elderly former child actor who shows B. an unnamed film created with stop-motion puppetry that was 90 years in the making and takes three months to watch. B. appraises the film (“about the artifice of fiction and the paucity of truth in our culture,” among many other things), as “the greatest cinematic masterpiece of perhaps all time.” After Cutbirth dies, he bequeaths the film to B., who loses it in a car fire and spends the rest of the novel consulting with therapists, desperate to reconstruct his experience of the film. Along the way, B. suffers a series of comic setbacks in his career and personal life, which leave him wondering, “Where does the movie end and my mind begin?” The Pynchonesque scope of Kaufman’s novel gives him liberty to have his opinionated narrator comment on innumerable cultural touchstones, especially in cinema, where B. throws shade with tongue firmly in cheek at filmmaker Charlie Kaufman, whom he derides as “a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude.” B.’s outsized personality and his giddily freewheeling experiences make this picaresque irresistible.

May 1, 2020
Celebrated screenwriter Kaufman's (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) debut novel is narrated by B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, an ingratiating and self-aggrandizing film critic who loathes Kaufman's films with a passion. B.'s life is transformed by the tragic loss of a three-month-long film made by a 119-year-old man over the course of 90 years that only B. has seen, and the bizarre techniques B. uses to try to remake it from memory. As B. delves ever deeper into his psyche, his life slowly unravels as he jumps from career to career and explores his various sexual proclivities. B., 58, desperately tries to be culturally aware, but manages to say and do everything slightly wrong, echoing the buffoonish bluster of Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. While convoluted (even for Kaufman), this novel is magnificently imaginative, bringing to mind Beckett, Pynchon, and A. R. Moxon's more recent The Revisionaries (2019). With this surprisingly breezy read, given its length, Kaufman proves to be a masterful novelist, delivering a tragic, farcical, and fascinating exploration of how memory defines our lives.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Kaufman's renown and Hollywood PR power will make this a summer must-read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)