THICC Lit

Abstract

THICC Lit Jurrit Daalder (bio) Antkind Charlie Kaufman Random House https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546823/antkind-by-charlie-kaufman/ 720 Pages; Print, $16.56 Novels in the nineties came THICC and fast. In the span of three short years, four long works landed with a thud on the doorsteps of critics and reviewers, who went on to lavish them with praise. The Tunnel (1995), Underworld (1997), Mason & Dixon (1997), all three were hailed as the crowning achievements of their authors' long and successful careers; Infinite Jest (1996), meanwhile, was said to mark the arrival of a dazzling new talent. For anyone aspiring to write "serious" fiction, the message was clear—clearer, perhaps, than it had ever been in the four decades since the publication of that postwar urtext, The Recognitions (1955). That message, spelled out in the quintessential nineties phrase embraced by publishers and venture capitalists alike, was this: either go big or go home. Novelists in the noughties certainly didn't pack it in. If anything, they doubled down on their efforts and produced a whole new spate of postmodern meganovels. The year 2000 alone saw the publication of House of Leaves, White Teeth, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. By then, of course, the genre had, in the words of James Wood, hardened into shape, and it is difficult now not to feel that most of these works are still, essentially, books of the nineties, doorstop novels that didn't quite make it into bookstores before the millennial shutters came down. To all appearances, Charlie Kaufman's Antkind missed its deadline by about twenty years. An early version did, reportedly, do the rounds in the nineties, but it wasn't until 2020 that these materials found their definitive form in Kaufman's debut novel, published by Random House. As such, Antkind bookends a decidedly more austere decade, one in which economic belt-tightening seems to have had a measurable impact on the girth of fiction, too. Sure, there was the odd exception: Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 saw the light in 2017, but that was, perhaps, only possible because of the strength of the Auster brand. The industry had, after all, just gotten burnt by City on Fire, the 2015 debut novel that netted its author, Garth Risk Hallberg, a whopping two-million-dollar advance, making it the very embodiment of the decade's too-big-to-fail philosophy. And yet fail it did, despite the industry's best efforts to swindle readers into believing it to be the latest tour de force. It's hard not to think, then, that Kaufman's Antkind arrives at a time when we could be witnessing the end of THICC Lit, though it should be added that this end would, quite fittingly, almost certainly be a protracted event. For one thing, deaths and endings have possessed the postmodern meganovel from the outset—so much so, in fact, that Mark Greif has been able to trace the big book's end all the way back to its beginning in the fifties, when "the death of the novel" discourse first took on the role of that master narrative on which the doorstop novel has come to depend. "The end," as Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) reminds us, "is built into the beginning." In the case of Antkind, its meditations on art and loss, this proves to be no different. The novel tells the story of B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, an ageing, embittered film scholar to whom the closest comparison might well be The Tunnel's William Frederick Kohler—a Kohler, that is, who has bothered to get with the times and couch his reactionary views in the PC lingo picked up at his Department's mandatory diversity training. When we first meet B., he is on his way to St. Augustine, Florida, where he plans to conduct archival research for an article on gender in A Florida Enchantment, a silent film that was shot there in 1914. But his initial plans are soon derailed when, back at his local rental, he meets his neighbor Ingo Cutbirth, an elderly black man in whiteface who claims to have been the...