Screenshot, Madeline Miller and David Mitchell in conversation.

It was just serendipity that the Chicago Humanities Festival scheduled two screenwriters with hot new novels two weeks in a row for their livestream show. Well, serendipity and the fact that the release dates were a week apart (July 7 and 14).

Last week, it was Charlie Kaufman (Anomalisa; Synecdoche, New York; andBeing JohnMalkovich) with his first novel,Antkind. This week, it was David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas,The Bone Clocksand eight novels) with his latest novel,Utopia Avenue.

This article is not a book review, but a report on the hosts conversations with two talented and idiosyncratic authors.

David Mitchells conversation with author Madeline Miller (her novels areSong of AchillesandCirce) turned out to be a mutual admiration fest.Miller did succeed in turning the conversation to Utopia Avenue and Mitchells other writings, but he came armed with a long list of questions, he said, about Millers two novels drawn from classic mythology; he flourished copies of both books to the video camera as he talked. Mitchell said hes a big admirer of Millers novels and so there was a lot of conversation about how Miller got interested in the classics (her mother read her The Iliad when she was 5 or 6), the longevity of myth, and the power of poetry in Homers writing.

Utopia Avenue is about a fictional British band in the 1960s (named Utopia Avenue after they decide against naming themselves The Way Out), and the four musicians who come together to make music and money. The band is formed under the guidance of a manager, Levon Frankland, who is a decent guy, not the stereotype evil dealer. Theres Elf (Elizabeth Frances), the keys player, vocalist and songwriter, who comes from the folk scene. Griff, the drummer, is a jazzer. Jasper is a virtuoso guitarist and songwriter and Dean is a talented, self-taught bassist and songwriter and former member of a band named Battleship Potemkin. (Jasper and Griff were with a sub-subpar band named Archie Kinnocks Blues Cadillac and Elf just broke up with her duo partner/boyfriend.)

The 60s were the early days of rock and roll and there were plenty of eclectic influences as bands began. The Stones were already well-established and enviably rich.

Mitchell, Lancashire-born and now living in County Cork, Ireland, has written a book larded with musical references, musical jargon, famous bands and track titles. Jasper meets a still-unknown David Bowie while leaving the bands management office. There are cameo appearances by famous musicians like Syd Barrett, Jimi Hendrix and Leonard Cohen.

When Miller asks Mitchell about works that influenced this book, he names the Canadian band Rush because of their high register vocabulary, Dr. Who and Isaac Asimovs Foundationseries .And one more thing: the childrens book series, Flat Stanley. As Flat Stanley found, upon becoming flat, a curse is a blessing and a blessing is a curse.

Mitchell isnt a musician but he admires the instant feedback loop that musicians have in live performance. Im jealous of that, he said, and commented that music is important to us from the womb on (when we are conscious of the bass track of our mothers heartbeat) and then in adolescence, when music is a tribal identifier. We have a primal relationship with music throughout our lives.

The musicians intention is changed by the listener, who adds personal meaning to the musicians work. And a novel cant make the reader hear the music, Mitchell acknowledged, but it can show its effect on human beings.

His descriptions of the bands early gigs are realistic, with the musicians terrified and their audiences in turn bored or insultingand later their audiences become adoring fans. The band members play off each other; they are strangers at first and become a unit. They start by playing in grungy, mostly empty college halls and rural bars. They travel in a decrepit van they call the Beast. It barely runs but it carries all their gear, amps and Griffs drum kit.

Miller commented on the interconnectedness of Mitchells novels: characters or incidents in one novel appear in others. He does that, he says, because it pleases me to do it. My characters get away and may have a future in another book. Im sometimes thinking three books ahead, he said.

Screenshot. Greta Johnsen and Charlie Kaufman discuss his book.

Antkind, the quirky, circuitous story of a film critic, and Kaufmans other writing was the subject of his conversation with Greta Johnsen (WBEZ and the Nerdette podcast) last week.

In Antkind, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, the not-Jewish film critic, drives through Florida, trying to keep his windshield bugfree and stopping at a Slammys for a biggy cola and paper towels. He has an African American girlfriend (you would know her name), a relationship of which hes inordinately proud. Hes headed for the St. Augustine Film History building, the architecture of which recreates the head of The Creature from the Black Lagoon,filmed nearby.. (The vault is in the chin; the screening room is in the left gill.) B. is there to do research for a monograph on a Black filmmaker.

The film critic serves partly as Kaufmans opportunity to lampoon film critics (they can write about you but you cant write about them). B. is a jerk, Kaufman says, has a deep need for approval, and hates the work of Charlie Kaufman. The book is often self-referential and in current argot, meta.

Mitchell explains the musicians intention being completed by the listeners experience and emotional state. Kaufman says a piece of work is completed by the readerit goes into your brain.

The main plot line of Antkind concerns the ancient outsider filmmaker that B. meets who has been working for 90 years on a stop-motion animation film with an army of puppets. Watching the film takes three months. B. decides this masterpiece could be the greatest discovery in the history of cinema plus it could save his foundering career. His attempt to bring the film to cinema royalty is the main story thread among many.

Kaufman is being interviewed from his temporary New York apartment. Johnsen asks him if he knew where he was going when he started writing the book, which, by the way, runs 720 pages. Not at the beginning, he says. I like to explore, sort of free form.I didnt know if it would be funny or something else. I tried writing in third person, then first person. (Its written from B.s perspective, in B.s voice.)

Johnsen asks him when he knew he was done. He worked on the book for five-and-a-half years, Kaufman said, and after about five years, he knew where he was goingbut thats by design. Everything is anxiety-inducing for me, he says, so I just add that to it (the anxiety).

Are there books that Antkind is in conversation with? Johnsen asks. Like Kafka, David Foster Wallace, Pynchon. He acknowledges that Kafka has been a big influence on his life and on his thinking. And I used to read a lot of Philip K. Dick, but not recently. Everything feels very of the moment.

Do you ever have writers block? Johnsen asks the standard issue question to a writer. Well, if I do, therere always things percolating even when you dont know they are. (So we might think of writers block as a different form of creativity.)

Charlie Kaufman has a thing for hirsuteness. He begins Antkind with a first-person homage by B. to his beard.

My beard is a wonder. It is the beard of Whitman, of Rasputin, of Darwin, yet it is uniquely mine. Its a salt-and-pepper, steel-wool, cotton-candy confection, much too long, wispy, and unruly to be fashionable. And it is this, its very unfashionability, that makes the strongeststatement. It says, I dont care a whit (a Whitman) about fashion. I dont care about attractiveness. This beard is too big for my narrow face. This beard is too wide. This beard is too bottom-heavy for my bald head. And on and on. Its what he calls his beard monologue.

In a 2015 photo of Kaufman from some film festival, his beard is thick, longish (not a goatee) and dark although not unruly. Hes also definitely not bald. Thick dark curly hair. So Im a little surprised when he Zooms onscreen to converse with Greta Johnsen. His hair is moderately cropped and ruly and hes beardless, but has a big old porn-star mustache.

As to the books themselves, Ive read the first 100 pages of Utopia Avenue and a little less of Antkind (in e-galley versions from the publisher). Utopia Avenue is immediately engrossing, as Mitchell introduces the band members and the London music setting of the late 1960s. I can tell by the smart and funny dialogue among the musicians, as well as hints of whats to come, that Im going to love Utopia Avenue. I know that its at least partly because Im smitten with the pop/rock music scene that UA immediately appeals to me.

Antkind feels as if it will be a novelized version of some of Kaufmans quirky films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. I didnt find the first section that I read as appealing as the other book, but Ive always felt you should read 100 pages of a book before deciding if you want to finish it or not.

Finally, I just want to say something about longggggg books. Mitchells is 574 pages and Kaufmans is 720 pages in print. Now Ive always been a devoted reader and Ive read my share of 700-page doorstops. Im looking at you Ron Chernow with your eye-opening Hamilton biography and David McCulloughs John Adamsor Simon Schamas glorious Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution at 900 pages! But those are all nonfiction. Of course, theres Ulysses (no, Ive never finished it) and Tom Wolfes Bonfire of the Vanities, which I devoured every word of. But whats wrong with a nice 300-page novel? I like a book that fits in my bag when Im commuting or traveling and that doesnt turn my arm numb when Im reading in bed. (Yes, I do read on a Kindle, but I prefer a real book.)

Maybe the pandemic is the time to finally read Ulysses from cover to cover.

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Tagged as: Antkind, Charlie Kaufman, CHF, Chicago Humanities Festival, David Mitchell, Greta Johnsen, Madeline Miller, PenguinRandomHouse, Utopia Avenue

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Conversations: Two Screenwriters Talk About Their New NovelsUtopia Avenue and Antkind - thirdcoastreview.com