Anybody can come up with an absurd premise. It takes a decent author to flesh it out and make it into a world. It takes an incredible storyteller to actually tie it up. And Kaufman is absolutely in this third category. The more I kept reading, the more absurd it got, the more curious I was about how he was gonna dig himself out of this hole that keeps getting weirder and surprisingly, he actually does!

I think Kaufman may be a true storyteller. That is, he just tells a story just for the sake of story with minimal agenda/philosophizing. This is a book about nothing, well mostly nothing. Its actually about a self-conceited, virtue signaling film critic's journey to recover a movie that could be the ticket to "thon" fame. So obviously there are minor themes here and there, and there's definitely some sort of meaning to the protagnist's journey but you spend 600-odd pages just reading someone riffing. I liked it. It was like I was on a looong drive with Kaufman and he's just telling me a story he's making up to pass time while he half-mindedly looks out of the window and watches the world go by.

I still have a few gripes with the book though. It goes on for too long. I wish it were 200 pages shorter (that seems to be my issue with most books lately, so maybe its me?). I also think he's surprisingly pretty heavy-handed with this book. I say surprisingly because his movies are anything but. Maybe while he is screenwriting, he's forced to condense his work? Idk. But it doesn't make his books any less surreal, just that it could have reduced the aforementioned 200 pages bloat. And finally, too MANY references to movies. I know I know, what did I expect from a screen writer/film aficionado? But at some point, it feels less like a reference to paint a picture and more like self-indulgent tidbit. Also, the fact like he references movie scenes to describe specific scenes in the book, it kinda makes it a bit less phantasmagoric because youre not really painting the scene for me. You're just pointing to a film scene and saying hey look, make it like that.