JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Reading Ali Smith is the most exhilarating experience. The things she can do with words—she bends them to her will, makes them fly with no visible effort. Her writing is exuberant, eccentric, and just when we thought everything has been done, original. Beginning in 2016, when Brexit signalled the end of the world as we know it (for me it was Prince’s death and then elections) she’s written a novel a year about our bizarre new world, where the truth is not the truth and everything you believe is wrong. The last volume Summer is hot off the presses, and in it the pandemic has begun. And yet the Seasonal Quartet is full of hope in humanity. Our species is not done yet.

Antkind, from the screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is not a novel to be consumed quickly. It is best read a chapter at a time in order to get to know its protagonist, film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, and enjoy its comic invention without becoming violently irritated at his dithering and self-loathing. Occasionally it is advisable to hurl it across the room, and when one’s tantrum has passed, to retrieve it and put it back on the shelf to return to the next day. It is about Rosenberg’s discovery of a stop-motion movie whose total running time is 3 months (Yes, a 3-month-long movie, so Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz have ADHD in comparison), and when it is destroyed, his attempts to reconstruct it from memory. Antkind is like your neurotic friend whom you can only bear in small doses but can’t write off entirely because suddenly they’ll do something brilliant.