The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
At the risk of pigeon guano on my face…
Charlie Kaufman is a writer of genius – but his debut novel is exhausting. By Tim Robey
CANTKIND Charlie Kaufman 720pp, Fourth Estate, £18.99, ebook £8.99
harlie Kaufman’s scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are dizzying plunges into their writer’s disordered brain. His directing debut, Synecdoche, New York, is about a monumentally depressing play that goes on for its creator’s whole life, while failing to redeem it. Capable of breaking you apart, that film has only grown in stature, cementing Kaufman’s reputation as the most cerebrally ambitious screenwriter of our time.
Disagree? Well, so does the hero of Kaufman’s first novel, Antkind. This imaginary nemesis – a film critic, heaven help us – thinks Kaufman is a total fraud. His name is B Rosenberger Rosenberg, and his company would be harrowing in real life. Try 705 pages trapped inside his first-person narration.
Rosenberg, a straight white man unloved by all, lives in terror of cancellation, and girds himself with disingenuous strategies to dodge it. He uses the “B” to create gender confusion in readers. He denies being Jewish, despite everyone’s assumptions. But enough of the “he”. He prefers the gender-neutral neoterism “thon”.
You don’t care for Rosenberg: in fact, he’s so intolerable you spend most of the novel wishing he’d die. In this, you have a novelist who sympathises. Every time Kaufman is denounced – on page 149 Rosenberg describes him as “a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude” – something farcically awful happens.
First the critic feels the “goopy and wet” plop of pigeon droppings on his face. After tripping into a series of manholes when daring to lambast specific Kaufman films, he begins to suspect string-pulling from a vengeful creator above. He isn’t wrong.
These skits of Job-like suffering are the wicked icing on the cake. But there’s a lot of cake. The plot starts with Rosenberg stumbling on an unseen avant-garde film made by a deranged old neighbour named Ingo, who may or may not be black. The film is three months long. Like the Synecdoche theatre piece, it’s a whole life’s work, and Rosenberg hasn’t even finished watching it before Ingo dies.
Rosenberg assumes the role of custodian for this outsider-art masterwork – it’ll be the making of him. Alas, he hasn’t got far before the film has gone up in smoke, bar a single frame, and he wakes up in a coma with almost zero recall.
Then? We delve into various forms of experimental therapy, to unlock fragments of the film in Rosenberg’s mind. Vast detours involve an Abbott-andCostello-esque double act called Mudd and Molloy, whose total unfunniness is the point, and yet one reiterated over hundreds of eminently trimmable pages.
Rosenberg becomes convinced he’s physically shrinking. He thinks the film ended a million years in the future, when Earth will be inhabited only by an ant called Calcium. Our critic has previously savaged The Ant Bully (2006) for its “unrealistic treatment of ant hospitals”, which is funny, but the bulk of Antkind takes the shape of a bizarrely distempered comic novel, amusing mainly at the margins.
Kaufman has inoculated his book against critique, especially by some twerpy film critic. Along the way, it performs a lot of defensive riffs about the woke climate in which Rosenberg writhes, with a fuming daughter, nudgingly rechristened “Grace Farrow”, who blogs about the evils of white privilege.
Outside the book, Kaufman has been frustrated by a dwindling of studio support, after the box office failures of Synecdoche and Anomalisa. His next film, a psychological horror called I’m Thinking of Ending Things, comes to Netflix in September. It’s an adaptation of a novel: easier to get off the ground these days.
For better or worse – I can sense the pigeons circling – Antkind is unadaptable. As a contemplation of middle-aged career woes, it might have been scaldingly honest, but it’s more often sneaky and guarded, and it just piles up. It doesn’t balloon to fill its own covers, or burst in that magically sad Synecdoche way. If you want to believe there’s no end to Kaufman’s imagination, there’s certainly no end to it here.
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