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The Verificationist
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375408229
Edition: 1st
ISBN: 0375408223
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: February 15, 2000
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: February 15, 2000
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
The narrator of Donald Antrim's The Verificationist is a middle-aged psychotherapist who meets a handful of colleagues at a pancake house one evening to engage in the seemingly innocuous activity of socializing while eating stacks of fried batter. What commences is a psychosexual deadpan comedy fraught with academic grandstanding, subtle flirting, and lots of good eatin'. Before long, Tom decides to start a food fight, but is restrained in a bear hug by Bernhardt, the father figure of the group. Our hero then proceeds to have an out-of-body experience in which he eavesdrops on his cohorts and ruminates on such things as the very essence of the pancake: We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake--Pancakes! Pancakes!--that we never learn to respect. Antrim's prose, at home somewhere between the psychologist's couch and a diner's Naugahyde booth, follows this tack for just shy of 200 pages, without chapter or page breaks. Readers familiar with the writer's earlier novels, The Hundred Brothers and Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, will spot this as his preferred modus operandi.
Tom, likewise, follows in the tradition of Antrim's other narrators--a timid yet well-meaning intellectual training his considerable observational and confessional skills upon a tableau at once pathetically banal and rife with meaning. Antrim has a talent for creating characters who speak contemporary psychobabble that falls far short of explaining the absurdity of their dilemmas. Rebecca, the pulchritudinous teenage waitress, and Escobar, Tom's suave Mediterranean friend, not only play their hour upon stage with earnest precision but serve to accentuate Tom's essentially pitiful nature. While Antrim's cast this time out is considerably downsized (literally 100 brothers appeared in The Hundred Brothers), he remains a writer who delights in bouncing disparate characters off one another with hilarious, disastrous results.
In plumbing the pathologies of millennial manhood, The Verificationist is part Robert Bly men's retreat, part sex comedy, and part doctoral thesis. It is served up like a combo platter, best enjoyed in a single sitting, and undeniably tasty. --Ryan Boudinot
From "a fiercely intelligent writer" (New York Times Book Review) and the author of The Hundred Brothers (a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist) comes a strikingly insightful and inspired new novel -- set in a pancake house. Donald Antrim's The Verificationist is a deadly serious, desperately playful, off-the-wall, and perfectly on-target book permeated by the unlikely smell of maple syrup in the evening and the sharpened consciousness of a group of psychoanalysts.
Tom is our narrator -- a seemingly adequately analyzed psychotherapist who, during a nightlong pancake dinner with colleagues, finds himself locked in an embrace with Bernhardt, the towering father figure of the group. Bernhardt is merely trying to keep Tom from starting a food fight, but the effects are disastrous: in an out-of-body experience, Tom floats up to the ceiling and from there looks down on himself and his cronies. Over the course of the night, he watches as his friendships, his marriage, even his professional identity, unfold and unravel until, in a catastrophic and inevitable tandem ascent and regression, he loses his very sense of himself as a man.
Taking on psychoanalysis and sex, work and family, The Verificationist explodes old myths and creates new ones. It is a wildly imagined, superbly written novel from a writer whose work has been hailed as "gloriously unhinged" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Great short story - lousy book
This book worked for about the first 30 pages and then not at all after that. The idea of a bunch of screwed up shrinks getting together was very creative and the execution of it was hysterical. The whole thing about the out-of-body experience didn't work and the book went downhill from there. I felt like I was wasting my time and couldn't wait until this book was over. I skipped a bunch of pages toward the back and resumed reading at the end, but it never got as good as in the beginning.
Rating:  - Out of Body Experience in a Pancake House
This 179-page novella is in a way the stream of consciousness of Tom, a middle-aged pyschologist who, meeting with his colleagues in a lower end pancake house, tries to start a food fight when a rival colleague, a burly man with a swollen ego, puts our narrator in a bear hug upon which Tom has an out of body experience in which he does a glorious exposition on the nature of pancake houses. The real business of this absurd (I mean that as a compliment), allegorical novel is to poke fun at the human ... Read More
Rating:  - Nothing more seductive -- and dangerous -- than pancakes
Antrim is probably my favorite "literary fiction" writer. Up until this point, his unreal invocations of worlds that are loosely connected to our own are the perfect places for his self-centered, monologuing protagonists.
THE VERIFICATIONIST, unfortunately, is less fantastic. It takes place in an entirely plausible pancake house, in a mostly plausible New Englandish town, with a slightly less plausible group of blathering shrinks sitting around trying to avoid talking either "shop" or each others ... Read More
Rating:  - Taking the novel to a new place
Somehow I think the definitive novel is one that is free to say anything about anything as Antrim does here and in his other novels. The trick is( or the art is) if its enjoyable and interesting. Antrim 'Verificationist' takes writing freedom to it's limits in a wonderful spell-binding way.Strange, beautiful, very funny masterpiece. It seems perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read.
Rating: - Great experimental yet accesible novel
This book is not for everyone, but it was an inspirational delight to me. It's so nice to read something so playful. To me it comes across like a fun intellectual flight of fancy. Basically, a neurotic man attends a pancake dinner which he orgnized for his fellow clinical psychologists. When it comes his turn to order, he is panicked by indecision. Soon he gets a mischiveous urge to start a food fight, and a colleague restrains him in a bear hug. He apparently has a nervous breakdown, because for the rest ... Read More
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