Charlie Kaufman has become a cult figure in the world of film, beginning with his Academy Award–nominated script for Being John Malkovich in 1999. Kaufman has earned a reputation for writing (and later, for directing) movies that critics describe as “highly original” and “dazzlingly singular”: Adaptation (2002), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Synecdoche, New York (2008), and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, released in 2020 on Netflix. Antkind (Random House) is Kaufman’s first novel, a seven-hundred-page brick of a book that tells the story of B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a would-be film critic who accidentally destroys the only copy of a hitherto-unknown cinematic masterpiece. The destroyed film was a work of stop-motion animation, one which took a full three months (yes: three months) to view. It was the work of “a psychotic African-American man named Ingo Cutbirth,” and all that could be salvaged was a single frame, from which Rosenberg hopes to reconstruct the film in its entirety (with the assistance of hypnosis). Antkind is jam-packed with in-jokes and scattered puns, larded with skewed references to pop culture and high culture. There are extended dream sequences and surreal scenarios, liberally seasoned with non sequiturs. The main obstacle to Rosenberg achieving his goal is that he is a film expert in his mind alone: he misattributes and misspells the titles of classic films; he praises Judd Apatow as an underrated comic genius. So, is Antkind funny? Yes, intermittently, but it’s the kind of humour where your smile begins to stiffen as you try (with limited success) to make sense of it all. At times Antkind reads like the outpourings of someone with no internal editor, whose every thought leaps immediately to the next like a cricket on a skillet. The resulting text is so lacking in structure that it virtually collapses into itself, so that Antkind becomes, in effect, a literary black hole, a book so dense with intention that no coherence can ever possibly emerge. Kaufman reportedly intended Antkind to be unfilmable; I’d say that he succeeded. —Michael Hayward