https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/25/antkind-by-charlie-kaufman-review-a-screenwriters-debut

Puppetry, metafictional self-awareness and incessant cultural referencing – all Kaufman’s trademarks in a novel that leaves the reader punchdrunk

This debut novel from the award-winning screenwriter of movie masterpieces such as Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York, is funny, exhausting and very, very long. Reading it is like watching (or being) someone trying to sprint to the top of an Escher staircase.

With its unmistakable obsessive-compulsive aesthetic, it could only have sprung from the head of Charlie Kaufman. There is the magnificent joke-telling stamina working against a constant crisis-of-faith undertow, which whispers that all comedy is futile and dishonest. There is the metafictional self-awareness and incessant autoreferencing of real movie celebrities and writers, including of course a despised “Charlie Kaufman”. There is Kaufman’s fascination with the false promise of cinema – of all art – that human existence can be represented; he catches himself in the act of thinking about his own existence, and then in the act of thinking about thinking about his own existence.