Thoughts on Antkind
I read Antkind by Charlie Kaufman recently and thought I'd write down some of my thoughts on it, if you'd care to read them. Also discussed: Gravity's Rainbow, Achewood, Ubik, et chetera
This book was recommended to me by a bartender friend, as well as this guy we used to call Nosferatu. I don't know what his actual name is, but we don't call him that anymore. Anyhow, I said I was in the mood for "another one of those convoluted postmodern books that make me difficult to speak to," and they threw out this one and I wound up with a copy a few months later. I've heard of Charlie Kaufman, but I haven't seen his movies. My friends tell me Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is miserable. So I didn't have much of an idea as to what to expect going in.
The critic quotes in the front of my edition make frequent reference to Thomas Pynchon, which I'm sure is quite an accolade for anyone who cooks up convoluted bricks like this one. I don't think that's a terrible comparison. The way that Antkind translates the vocabulary and tempo of a film into that of a novel reminds me of the last third of Gravity's Rainbow, especially the "Byron the Bulb" sequence. But I think a more immediate point of reference is A Confederacy of Dunces. Our protagonist, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, is like if Ignatius J. Reilly was actually a bad person and not just unsociable and obnoxious.
This brings us almost immediately to the aspect of the book I really did not enjoy. Our main character is completely obsessed with politically correct jargon and virtue signalling. It is the sun around which his neurotic stream of consciousness (which runs rampant and unrestrained throughout most of the novel) revolves. He is constantly apologizing for being white. He compulsively informs black people that he has a black girlfriend. He's invented a neopronoun ("thon") that he insists on applying to as many people as possible, whether they like it or not. This book was published in 2020, and I don't think I would have appreciated this then, and it has certainly not gotten funnier with time.
The choice to establish 'diversity, equity and inclusion' as the central target of your pithy satire of modern life is one I have next to zero patience for. One of the campaign promises our current president successfully ran under was to "eliminate transgender." Avowed white supremacists and genocidal maniacs are now cherished allies of the regime, if not high-ranking employees themselves. I resent waking up to a world where "maybe all this equal rights stuff has gone a bit too far" is a moderate and respectably bipartisan opinion, and I don't need to hear about it from some pretentious tit for seven hundred-odd pages. In a scene towards the end of the book, we are shown a harrowing vision of the future of cinema: a genderless twentysomething screaming "look at me!" into the camera for ninety minutes. That seems a particularly petulant take from a guy who wrote himself into his own book twice, not only as a real-world cultural touchstone but also as an omniscient god who speaks directly to the reader at one point.
It's possible, I suppose, that I just don't get it. Maybe Kaufman is operating on some rarefied level of progressive irony and I'm too prudish and scolding to laugh along with him. It's not like Rosenberg exudes any sort of ethical primacy. His adoption of inclusivity is purely an extension of his repressed self-loathing. He rants at length about how it's time to de-center men and listen to women for a change, and immediately starts going through some lady's trash and jerks off outside her apartment. He has no cognitive dissonance, and next to no static opinions or ideals. This lack of critical faculty is perfect for his chosen profession - he's a film critic. Ha! Maybe if the only young people he meets didn't seem to have come straight off the set of a Daily Wire skit I'd be more willing to buy in.
I fear I've buried the lede here. This book is pretty darn good. It just also made me really angry. Let's move on: to complete the blender pitch I was teeing up at the beginning of this write-up, this is like A Confederacy of Dunces meets Philip K. Dick's Ubik. It moves with a speed and agility that belies its gargantuan conceptual footprint. There are some segments that I did not enjoy (like when Rosenberg becomes aware that he is in a book written by Charlie Kaufman, his least favorite filmmaker - come on) but they never really overstay their welcome. The reality of the story becomes increasingly fluid as it progresses, and by the end there seems to be nothing left standing. And the coolest part is, that's when the plot seems to fall into place. The vast majority of the surreal twists and turns do have an explanation, and it's a pretty satisfying psychedelic-science-fiction sort of move. It almost feels like a narrative double negative - the book drives itself insane, and runs its course to a conclusion that's even more insane, and somehow in the process starts making perfect sense. But if you tried to summarize it to someone, you'd sound like a maniac. Truly, the map is not the territory.
So, what is this book about? An easier question might be, "what happens in this book?" Rosenberg stumbles upon a stop-motion film that takes three months to watch, made by a very old man who seems to have a different personality every time he's spoken to. In addition to the puppets seen on screen, he's also animating all the characters that the camera isn't facing towards - an entire puppet world, basically, moving forward frame by frame and never seen or referenced in the film. What happens in this movie? Well, that's also hard to say, because all the film is destroyed in a fire shortly after the filmmaker dies and Rosenberg finishes watching it for the first time. This is all in the first hundred pages or so, the real meat of the book is Rosenberg's quest to remember the film as reality seems to be dissolving around him. Dissolving and merging with that of the film. Or at least, his memories of the film. And his memory is extremely suspect. See how this goes? He has all sorts of horrible little adventures along the way, stalking women, working at a series of shoe stores, doing ketamine, getting hypnotized. Around the halfway point it feels like this book is going to be about dementia or something, a sad old man who is experiencing cognitive decline, confused and unlovable, sliding into poverty and eventually homelessness. It was really bumming me out for a while, and my friends were questioning why I feel the need to read "those awful books you keep finding."
But then it keeps getting weirder, in the best way. It would seem that the film is a prophecy of sorts - or some sort of backwards-facing prophecy that explains events that happened in the past but are otherwise inexplicable or secret. It serves as a record of, and field guide to, the forked timeline that Antkind takes place in. It becomes apparent that the historical inconsistencies and minute-to-minute changes on the micro and macro scale are not (entirely) all in Rosenberg's head, but the result of temporal meddling by a variety of characters from the future. In our world, two "miracle babies" did not appear to Michael Collins as he orbited the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored it. But at some point in the book, it does happen - or, it is inserted into the timeline and from then on has happened - capice? Related to this phenomenon: the Kentucky Meat Shower, various sea monsters and beach blobs, and a slew of failed vaudeville comedy duos, several of whom are assassinated by Abbot and Costello. At least, that's how it goes in the movie. But by the end of the book, the distinction between the movie and the "real world" is inconsequential.
There are some things that can't entirely be explained by time travel. Most notably, the chapters where Rosenberg escapes from Charlie Kaufman's narrative control (ugh) and goes on a sojourn through the land of the Unseen - essentially, puppet hell. He becomes a puppet himself (despite having thrown off his creator god? interesting), has sex with a mountain, and spends an eternity meditating until he achieves enlightenment. Incidentally, the giant mountain Oleara Debord, so tall that it reaches into space and which apparently has some degree of personhood, is the one part of this book I don't understand. If anyone is still reading this diatribe, and has read the book, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I have one guess but it's not a great one. Anyhow, after returning to "reality", he discovers the author has decided to rewrite the story. There's a new Rosenberg who's the exact opposite of the original, the magical film has been inverted as well. Our original Rosenberg kills this newer model and takes his place, and then kills the next replacement when the narrative is reset again. The march towards the inevitable dystopian holocaust and sci-fi post-apocalypse can't be stopped by any of these hijinks, however, and sooner or later we find ourselves all the way past Ubik and somewhere into the middle sections of Cloud Atlas. Donald Trump shows up. Actually, millions of Donald Trump robots show up, with jetpacks and laser eyes.
I don't think I'll get into exactly how the book ends. You do sort of understand why the book is titled Antkind. You do sort of understand the recurring theme of bloody objects falling out of the sky. And you get a really milquetoast soliloquy about the persistence of memory, which I hope is supposed to be stupid because Rosenberg is stupid and not a Big Philosophical Note to end your fuck-ass novel on. But the humor mostly hits, and the concept of being semi-aware of your timeline being altered is fantastic, literally, and very well-executed. And part of me still wants to look into this guy and see what things he's said on talk shows or interviews or podcasts, but I don't think I'm going to.
One final note of comparison: this book reminds me very, very much of Chris Onstad's phenomenal webcomic Achewood. Both in its comic timing and its dreamlike left turns into bespoke surrealism. I don't think I'd recommend Antkind nearly half as much as I'd recommend Achewood, but if you have read one and not the other I bet you'd appreciate the similarity. I'll close out this post (that really feels like it could have just been a diary entry) with some Achewood panels that I was specifically reminded of while reading the book:
