In a characteristically cheery speech for BAFTA’s 2011 screenwriter’s lecture series, Charlie Kaufman likened modern man to carpenter ants that have had their brains infected by a species of fungus and are compelled by mind control to sacrifice themselves to help the fungus propagate. Mr. Kaufman’s novel “Antkind” (Random House, 705 pages, $30) doesn’t make the comparison as succinctly—absolutely nothing in this baggy, voluminous debut novel is succinct—but it takes a similarly jaundiced attitude toward questions of free will, cultural manipulation and the possibility of independent thought and creation.
But this is Charlie Kaufman, writer of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” writer-director of “Synecdoche, New York,” so “Antkind” is primarily an absurdist comedy, inhabiting what its narrator, the 58-year-old professional film critic and nonprofessional schlemiel B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, calls “the world of funny pain.” During a research trip to Florida, Rosenberg discovers a hidden masterpiece of filmmaking: A 3-month-long animated movie that an outsider artist named Ingo Cutbirth has been working on for 90 years. Cutbirth dies after the screening and Rosenberg’s truck catches on fire while he’s driving the reels to New York. Determined to share Cutbirth’s work of genius in spite of its physical destruction, Rosenberg enters hypnosis therapy in an attempt to retrieve his memories of the film, and the bulk of “Antkind” switches between the deepening calamity of Rosenberg’s waking life and the scenes he reconstructs from the movie—or perhaps feverishly invents, as it’s impossible to tell the difference.
What’s the movie about, you ask? A lot of it, at least in Rosenberg’s version, concerns a cut-rate Abbott and Costello duo called Mudd and Molloy. Why these scenes would constitute revolutionary filmmaking is impossible to discern, but Mr. Kaufman’s attraction to them makes sense, as he himself is a one-man two-man act, playing both the buffoon and the straight man on every page. The humor in “Antkind” is as broad as the novel is long. A lot of it comes from Rosenberg’s pompous denunciations of popular culture. (“Starbucks is the smart coffee for dumb people. It’s the Christopher Nolan of coffee.”) For the rest Mr. Kaufman favors straight-up sight gags. There’s a running joke in which Rosenberg falls into an open manhole every time he steps outside. At one point he takes a job selling clown shoes, which gets him tangled up with a “sex-positive feminist clown collective called Circus Her-Kiss.” Good luck explaining any of this. Mr. Kaufman’s method is to introduce a farcical non sequitur and then to retcon it into a semblance of a narrative.
The book’s shifting parameters of reality make this possible—or, rather, they cancel out the concept of a meaningful narrative. Mr. Kaufman is obsessed with the flaws in consciousness: the ways that experience blurs with dreams and imagination, the ways the mind is vulnerable to persuasion and memories to revision. As in his films, there are concentric circles of meta-worlds, there are doppelgängers, and there are lots and lots of puppets.
The literary antecedent to this gallimaufry is Thomas Pynchon, who is visible not only in the novel’s fanatical sprawl, its love of silly names and cornball jokes, but also in its paranoid conviction that we are all trapped inside somebody else’s simulation. Rosenberg’s revelation, late in the book, that he may be a figment of the mind of Charlie Kaufman comes as a source of existential horror, especially because he despises Kaufman’s films.
How much you like his films will give you a fair sense of how much patience you’re willing to extend to this novel. For my part, I have a soft spot for Mr. Kaufman’s Catskills-lodge humor, even if it does sometimes reek of flop sweat. And while the book’s endless recursions and self-references seem like the stuff of undergraduate philosophy, there’s something touching about the narrator’s hapless attempts to navigate that nonsensical world and extract truth and significance from it. I wouldn’t want to be a captive in Mr. Kaufman’s consciousness either, but being a voyeur is a different matter. There is something about this book’s extravagantly appointed lunacy that makes the lunacy of real life feel (briefly) more manageable.
In case you’ve still not had enough of him, Charlie Kaufman appears in Jim Carrey’s faux-autobiographical novel “Memoirs and Misinformation” (Knopf, 255 pages, $27.95), written with Dana Vachon. Perhaps this is a sign of a profound synchronicity in the Hegelian Weltgeist. Or maybe it just means that people in show biz like to talk about themselves.
The story finds megastar actor Jim Carrey in a midlife slough of despond, his career at low ebb following the box-office flop of his Oscar-bait picture “I Love You Phillip Morris” (2009). Holed up in his Brentwood mansion, Carrey tries to snap out of his depression with a shotgun marriage to a gold-digging B-lister and then by agreeing to play the role of the reincarnated spirit of Mao Zedong for a movie treatment by the beady-eyed Kaufman that is so offensive to the mores of political correctness and to the standards of wealthy Chinese investors that it has no chance of being made. Eventually Carrey succumbs to his brand managers and signs on to “Hungry Hungry Hippos in Digital 3-D,” agreeing to license his AI essence to the franchise so that sequels can be made in perpetuity.
Having presumably left the writing part of this project to the capable Mr. Vachon, Mr. Carrey affects a tone of jaded contempt for the Hollywood star system. And while he pokes fun at the narcissistic, mystically inclined habits of coddled movie stars, the gibes double as zany gossip about his celebrity buddies. (Did Nicolas Cage really buy a sixth-century sword at Sotheby’s?) The nifty thing about Mr. Carrey’s caricatures is that they simultaneously serve as self-promotion. The story ends with Carrey and other stars battling an alien invasion, an antic, hammy finale that points up the book’s essential silliness while also highlighting the fact that, in Mr. Carrey’s mind, his career misfortunes and Armageddon are inextricably connected. This novel is harmless fun, but it’s still more press release than satire.
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