Antkind

Kaufman needs collaborators and a visionary editor. He’s like the fissile material in a nuclear weapon: shaped and guided he turns vast swaths of everyday emptiness into glowing, fraught, open fields. Left on his own he indiscriminately floods us with deadly noise and sinks into a pit of radioactive slag. I absolutely respect and admire him, which is why I hate this book.

The protagonist of this novel (who would repeatedly bore you with trite linguistic and literary commentary on the terms ‘protagonist’ and ‘novel’ and then on ‘terms’ and imply all gestures, transactions, or equivalences are somehow corrupt) isn’t an anti-hero, he is the denial of the possibility of maturity, an insistence on the inauthenticity of benevolence. With extra verbiage about racial and sexual injustice that is simultaneously so overwrought and counter to his actual choices that…

My God it tires me out. I quit 71 pages in. I love “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich”. Supported “Anomalisa” on Kickstarter and watched the first ten minutes but both my wife and daughter hated it and I had to admit they quickly detected what I only reluctantly and queasily accepted: just because something accurately displays stupid small human behavior doesn’t make it, well, anything.

Which brings me back to Antville. It isn’t anything, so skip it. I hope Kaufman does more, and better, and floods us with light – clever, reactive, inviting and baleful, exposing potential and limitation, growth and decline. I’ll still give anything (else) he does a chance.

If I wanted to read a white dude navel gazing about how fought privilege is while obsessively discussing obscure topics, I would just read reddit for free.

It really doesnt have enough flair in the prose to make it worth reading and definitely not enough plot to make this anything more than author takes on the perspective of someone toxic purposefully but without any flair or a hook.

Such a shame since Kaufman is one of my favorite screenwriters.

No spoilers, read ahead!

Can thonself even write a review of a savage sendup of review/criticism culture? Would I not be playing directly into the author’s point?

I’m evaluating this novel on two levels. The first and most important is entertainment level–this book was crazy funny. Like, seriously, how often do you laugh out loud when reading a novel? I lol-ed on average every few pages, minimum. At first I wasn’t sure if I was happy with the book because I was so entertained, but I was asking myself, “but will there be more…substance?” More on that in part 2. I still have to talk about how funny this book was. And it’s absolutely signature Charlie Kaufman–the transition from screen writing to novel writing seems completely seamless. It’s dizzying, maddening, confusing, maniacally recursive…and if you like Kaufman, that’s what you’re here for. And I was HERE for it. The obvious peer to this book is A Confederacy of Dunces. I have to believe that Kaufman was somewhat inspired by that book. I won’t say it’s better, because I need to sit and marinate in this story over the next decade and see how it turns out. One really helpful takeaway I took is that there are just so many throw away one-liners, which is awesome. But when you see those in his movies you think “is there a deeper meaning there, is that a plot twist?” et chetera when something crazy happens (like when the wife in Synechdoche reveals her surprise full back tattoo). So this helps me when watching his movies that if something insanely funny but also zany/unrealistic happens it’s just Charlie making us laugh and you don’t necessarily need to parse for deeper meaning. But of course it always also works on the level that reality is fully absurd and we should not be taking it seriously, at all. That’s ALWAYS Charlie’s point.

Second level of analysis–how did this work as a story? You know, the more I sit back and kind of think, the more connections I see. Just as with his movies, I’m sure that repeat readings are highly, highly rewarded. As soon as a finished I went back to the beginning, as, sure enough, things that were weird upon first reading will now make sense.

The thing is–the book is perfect. It’s not perfect in that it probably could be 400-500 pages, and sometimes the crazy is so thick to even exasperate the most diehard Kaufman fan–but that’s the thing. Charlie is singular, and can only be compared to thonself. In the end Charlie weaves a story to make the points he always returns to–we’re all crazy and cracked, how can we really know anything, best that we just do the best we can and let others do the same–BUT, even though that’s the answer, we always screw it up. We miss each other, miss the point, we’re vainly ambitious, and we’re pretty much hopeless–yet we do experience moments of beauty and bliss, and life is actually pretty funny if you don’t take it too seriously.

A brilliantly funny book of race and gender in present day America. As wind blows through its pages, I cannot help but to catch the scent of John Kennedy Toole and even The Coen Brothers. I cannot put it down.

I was alerted to the release of this book by a comment on my Facebook Thomas Pynchon fan group. It was basically highly sceptical of some critic’s claim that this book made Thomas Pynchon read like Dr.Seuss. That would make it a major literary event. It doesn’t and it’s not. Nonetheless it is a very funny book. As critics like to say it is fiercely intelligent and, deeply humane at its root. About what you’d expect of a novel penned by the script-writer of, amongst other things, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I was also attracted to the book by its title which promised to feed me fascination with the metaphor of insect societies for the general grotesqueries of human society. I was hoping for something like William T Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, which to my mind was a major literary milestone that went unnoticed. Again it wasn’t. Not a chitinous carapace in sight. But as a labyrinthine and zany plotline, involving films within dreams, within dreams, within movies, within hypnosis sessions, it certainly had echoes of Vollmann’s missed masterpiece. Having said that, the whole thing is taken from the first person POV of a single central character making it not particularly challenging to follow. Unlike Pynchon where you’re four pages along and you suddenly realise you’ve been in the head of a completely different character situated at a different place and time, and you go back to reread it, and after three attempts you’re still not sure where the transition occurred.

Other reviews suggest that it’s full of abstruse and obscure allusions. As a reader of Joyce and Pynchon i did not find this to be so, which i guess defines me as sadly over-educated. Most of the references are to movie directors. Reading it on the Kindle made it very easy to look up anyone’s name that was unfamiliar. The pace is unrelenting and the comedy never flags or becomes repetitive, but that in itself can become exhausting with such a long book. I took time out half way through to read a biography of the rock group Soft Machine, and then returned to this without any great sense of disruption. Does it need to be quite so long? I’ve not quite reached the end yet so i don’t know if there is a punchline or if it’s just an endless recursion of shaggy dog stories. The guy has a lot to say, and he’s funny so it doesn’t matter.

At its essence the comedy is based on the increasing mental contortions that the privileged white male who just wants to be a decent human being has to go through to exist with some kind of dignity in the MeToo, BLM era. If there is a message then perhaps it is that sure, we all need to get ‘woke’. The more the merrier. But if that’s accomplished with just sanctimonious snarkinees, and without a bit of humorous self-deprecation, then we’ll just end up making a world that’s no better than the one we are trying to change.

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