The Outlook for Earthlings
Joan Frank
Regal House Publishing 2020
Reviewed by Bob Wake
Melanie Taper and Scarlet Rand are Northern California-raised, self-searching, not always in sync, but supportive of one another since they were teenagers talking about boys and books at the school bus stop. Joan Frank’s ambitious new novel, The Outlook for Earthlings, is a puzzle-perfect narrative of interlocking flashbacks and flash-forwards, chapters qualifying and revising one another, circling elusive truths, charting the vicissitudes of Melanie and Scarlet’s decades-long friendship. Our perceptions and sympathies are jerked and jolted. Perspectives multiply. Consider a character’s anxiety when she ends a college affair with a married professor: “She felt like a cubist painting, pieces of her broken off and floating about the room. Mouth here, hand there, eyeball there.” The cubist dysmorphia foreshadows a medical illness.
Friendship cannot function without a measure of confoundedness. Melanie might privately think of Scarlet, “Heavens, the woman wore her emotions like a sandwich board.” Scarlet, in an unkind moment, casts Melanie as a “docile homemaker” to Scarlet’s “globetrotting roustabout.” (Just as quickly, Scarlet retracts the labels as “vain, reductive.”) As a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Scarlet lives her dream. Both women will eventually hold down unfulfilling jobs to make ends meet. Melanie Taper, one of the most enigmatic characters in recent fiction, becomes a prodigious autodidact:
Mel knew all of Shakespeare, much of it by heart. She was reading Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Musil, Unamuno. She listened to postgraduate lectures on cassette while she drove to work: Philosophy of Religion, Foundations of Western Civ. She had lately told Scarlet, in perfect seriousness, she thought she should learn Italian so that she could read Montale and Morante in the original.
Melanie writes stories and novels and never seeks their publication. She’s preternaturally selfless in marriage and love. (“Subjugating oneself like some wretched servant” is Scarlet’s interpretation.) Melanie’s endlessly expanding and long-delayed graduate school thesis on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is conceived as a kind of emotional rescue of the epileptic Prince Myshkin. (“She felt this way about others, literary or real: poor Raskolnikov; poor Van Gogh. Somebody needed to make them some soup.”)
Joan Frank has a painter’s eye for the natural world. (“The early sun struggled through the fog, a light of dirty wet coins.”) And a keen appreciation for the way our senses are assaulted by institutional spaces, such as academic administration offices. (“Smells of cleaning fluid, aging paper, bookbinding, overcooked coffee.”) The Outlook for Earthlings doesn’t discount the possibility of spectral visitations within the naturalistic confines of our world, but neither does it comfortably decipher them for us when they perhaps appear. The author’s tough-minded body of work, which includes numerous award-winning novels, short story and essay collections, has long refused to do the reader’s necessary work. Our task is clear. Each of us must answer for ourselves when this forceful and singular novel, arguably Joan Frank’s finest work to date, asks of us, “Did any ending ever befit the life it capped?”
At 720 pages, Antkind succeeds as a large-scale comic novel. This is an impressive feat for a first-time novelist (albeit a first-time novelist who happens to be an Oscar-winning screenwriter). Line for line, page for page, Antkind is frequently deliriously funny. Kaufman’s 1990s TV scripts for comics like Chris Elliot are a clear influence. Antkind’s narrator and protagonist, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a self-important film critic, has the snotty arrogance that Elliot mastered so perfectly. Chris Elliot’s willingness to risk unlikeability is both his genius as a comic performer and probably his undoing with audiences (e.g. Cabin Boy). Charlie Kaufman seems to intuitively understand that an insufferable character is only as bearable as the jokes exposing the character’s pretensions and selfishness. Antkind has the jokes like Arby’s has the meats. As Kaufman has shown in his wildly inventive film scripts (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), he’s never met a meta gag that he can’t spin into comedy gold. Not unlike Martin Amis’s insertion of “Martin Amis” as a character in his novel Money, Antkind’s film critic is deeply hostile to the very real films of Charlie Kaufman (while extolling the more comfortably mainstream films, both real and imaginary, of Judd Apatow). Although the novel’s sci-fi trappings—time-travel and multiverses—seem at times like a lesser work by Philip K. Dick (name-checked in Antkind as an “American primitivist”), Antkind’s slapstick exuberance is like a live-action Tex Avery cartoon.
An author’s note chillingly informs us that U.S. coastal regions “harbor millions of pounds of dumped munitions” from military training exercises. The family in the poem visits the local police station to dispose of the shell. The mother is left discomforted. A chain-reaction of metaphors follows. She is haunted by her son’s autism and wonders “what it would look like / the bin for safe disposal of genes / that can ruin children.” These lines pack the kind of gut-punch that Rebecca Foust’s work never shies away from. She has addressed her son’s autism in poems over the years, at times with grace and understanding, and at other times with cosmic fury.
Frank’s well-received 2017 novel, 
Impersonal travel essays are nowhere to be found in Frank’s deeply personal collection of travel essays, Try to Get Lost. She is blessedly blunt about this turbulent era “of perhaps the most frightening protofascist ever to assume office in American history.” Her essay “Red State, Blue State” is a Baedeker for bad times. Survival strategies include everything from exercise to charity work to “you drink.” Pulling up stakes is an option, not a panacea. “Travel beats us up,” she admits in “Shake Me Up, Judy.” “Sleep’s elusive. Stress is amped.” Her sketches of European cities benefit enormously from shoe leather reporting (and the accompanying shin splints). The verisimilitude is breathtaking. Shop windows in Italy (“In Case of Firenze”) inspire a cinematic cascade of history and culture:
An instant classic. Adrienne Miller was the fiction editor at Esquire magazine in the late-90s when she was still in her twenties. Crossed paths with Mailer, Updike, Bret Easton Ellis, Dave Eggers, and, the real subject of 
There are deadpan sections of Flights outlining in utterly plausible detail an academic pursuit referred to as travel psychology, whose practitioners meet in airports for their conferences and workshops. “Practical travel psychology investigates the metaphorical meaning of places,” we’re told. Another recurring element of Flights investigates the human body itself as a landscape of infinite inward exploration. The history of phantom pain and the embalming of bodies for medical study are discussed at length. The encyclopedic flurry of anatomical and geographical info must have presented a challenge for Jennifer Croft, who translated the novel with evident eloquence from Olga Tokarczuk’s Polish. No surprise that Croft shared with Tokarczuk the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights. A masterful literary work that feels like a contemporary classic in the making.
