ANTKIND

Always centrifugal screenwriter Kaufman delivers a terrific debut novel that makes Gravity’s Rainbow read like a Dr. Seuss story.

You know you’re in for strange times when a young fast-food cashier cites an anecdote about Jean Cocteau (“They once asked him what he would take from a burning house”) while offhandedly observing that the vehicle you’re driving is on fire. So it is with B. (for Balaam) Rosenberg, a film historian who, visiting Florida, falls in with a curious African American man of impossibly old age. That swampy state is the setting for Kaufman’s screenplay Adaptation, mysterious, humid, full of weird critters, just as we find it in the opening pages of Kaufman’s shaggy ant story. (As for the ants, once our strange kind does itself in, they’ll remain: “Only ants now. And fungus.” But that’s long in the future, as time begins to reverse itself like a film reel being rewound.) Rosenberg, who insists throughout that he’s not Jewish, finds and loses a film that our Methuselah has been making for 90 years and that takes three months to view. It’s Rosenberg’s brief to reconstruct the thing via a single remaining frame and a weird hypnotist. Back in New York, he wows an HR rep and lands a job at an online shoe-delivery company, which lands him in the clown-shoe business, which leads to impure thoughts (“I picture her naked but with clown makeup on, and instantly I realize a new fetish has been born”) and eventually his dismissal from said conglomerate. He also falls in with a certain Donald Trump—beg pardon, Trunk, as obnoxious in robotic as in human form. Inside jokes abound, with digs at the likes of Judd Apatow, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson, along with a ringing denunciation of one Charlie Kaufman (“a poseur of the most odious sort”). It’s a splendid, spectacular mess, much like Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, commanding attention from start to finish for its ingenuity and narrative dazzle.

Film, speculative fiction, and outright eccentricity collide in a wonderfully inventive yarn—and a masterwork of postmodern storytelling.