If Surprise Makes A Great Novel, ‘Antkind’ Is A Great Novel

Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind is a novel only Charlie Kaufman could have written. I’m aware of how vague that sentence is, but I assure you it fits the novel perfectly. Antkind is strange, disjointed, and obsessive. It’s also a wildly imaginative narrative in which Kaufman mentions himself several times, discusses his own work, and claims no one has made a “real” movie about New York. You could call it a brilliant piece of metafiction or a marvel of postmodern storytelling and you’d be right — but you could also call it bloated or a flashy, eloquent mess and you’d also be right. Ah, subjectivity. B. Rosenberger Rosenberg is a film critic and scholar who thinks his work is underappreciated. When he finds an unseen film made by a strange man, B. becomes convinced his career will skyrocket and thinks the movie — a stop-motion film that’s three months long and took nine decades to make — will shock the film world. Unfortunately, the film is destroyed, and B. is left with only a single frame of