Char­lie Kauf­man has writ­ten a nov­el about a failed film critic

We haven’t heard much from screenwriter/​filmmaker/​thinker of great thoughts Char­lie Kauf­man since 2015’s Anom­al­isa, his ten­der stop-motion fan­ta­sy of alien­ation and pup­pet cun­nilin­gus. There was the announce­ment that he’d debut the new fea­ture I’m Think­ing of End­ing Things in 2020 via Net­flix, but we’ve yet to see frame one of that and we’ve heard lit­tle else about pend­ing projects until now.

He hasn’t been rest­ing on his lau­rels dur­ing the past five years; he’s been hard at work on what might be his most ambi­tious and dense­ly con­cep­tu­al endeav­or yet. Enter­tain­ment Week­ly broke the news that Kaufman’s debut nov­el Antkind, first rumored to be in the works around 2012, will at long last get a release from Ran­dom House.

The book revolves around a failed film crit­ic named B. Rosen­berg, who hap­pens upon a ground­break­ing dis­cov­ery: a film with a run time of three months, pro­duced over the span of nine­ty years, includ­ing inter­mis­sions spec­i­fy­ing bath­room breaks, eat­ing, and sleep­ing. Rosen­berg grows obsessed with that, as out­lined in the col­or­ful pro­mo­tion­al copy from Ran­dom House, repro­duced by Enter­tain­ment Week­ly and below:

No less fas­ci­nat­ing is the author state­ment Kauf­man includ­ed with the release: ​“There are no bud­getary lim­i­ta­tions in a nov­el. There is no stu­dio over­sight. There are no focus groups. In fact, this book is in part about that; it’s about an impos­si­ble movie.” He sounds like a lib­er­at­ed man.

The premise fits snug­ly in with Kaufman’s cin­e­mat­ic canon, ori­ent­ed as it is around large-scale fac­sim­i­les of life (as in Synec­doche, New York) and impen­e­tra­ble works of art (as in Adpata­tion.). Next year, after a half-decade draught, we get a new nov­el and film — tru­ly, an embar­rass­ment of Kaufman.