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.