The New Yorker wants to know if Charlie can get out of his own head
I thought this piece by Jon Baskin was going to be an Antkind review, and then as I read I thought Oh, it's an essay on Charlie's use of post-modern techniques to explore ideas of self and whatnot... and then it turned out to be indeed a review of Antkind. But it's a pretty cerebral review, taking in the wider context of Charlie's work and other post modern writers who hit it big around the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's an interesting read. Contains spoilers, though.
In their most successful works, artists like Wallace and Kaufman reassured their audiences that earnest emotion remained possible, even at the end of history. That these artists used so many postmodern techniques in the first place, however, testified to their sense that sincerity in an age of irony was no simple matter.
[...] It makes sense that Kaufman, one of our deepest and most imaginative thinkers about the self, would want to write a novel, one of our most conspicuous channels for self-investigation. That novel, "Antkind", has arrived, and, due to its length and slapstick sense of humor, it has already been labelled Pynchonesque. But the author referred to most often in the book is Samuel Beckett, and this offers a better clue about the tradition Kaufman aspires to belong to. In contrast to Pynchon’s political epics, Beckett’s work is one of the landmark achievements of literary introspection. "Molloy", the first book in his mid-century trilogy (and the one most often alluded to in “Antkind”), contains no secondary characters and hardly any events. It is famous partly for showing that great art can emerge solely from a mind wrestling with itself. (Source)