The Verificationist: A Novel - Softcover

Donald Antrim

3.43

992 ratings by Goodreads

9780312662141: The Verificationist: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312662149 ISBN 13: 9780312662141

Publisher: Picador, 2011

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With a New Introduction by George Saunders

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

It is early spring, and Tom has called together his fellow psychologists at the Krakower Institute for their biannual pancake supper―a chance for likeminded analysts to talk shop and casually unburden themselves over flapjacks. But, as Tom knows (at least subconsciously), his brainy colleagues are a little on edge―simmering with romantic tension and professional grievance, their stew of conflicting ego and id just might boil to the surface before the pretty waitress brings their next coffee refill. When Tom tries to provoke a food fight, a rival colleague locks him in a therapeutic hold, triggering a transcendent if totally bizarre transformation that will free Tom to confront his greatest pleasures and fears.

Darkly funny and beautifully written, The Verificationist confirms Donald Antrim as one of America's best and most original authors.

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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 the Publisher:

"If you could actually yank the control box from one of Antrim's busily cerebral novels, God knows what you'd find in there. Bats, maybe. An audiocassette edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, recited by Monty Python. And probably the shrunken heads of Thomas Pynchon, Nicholson Baker, Edgar Allan Poe and Donald Barthelme, writers whose DNA seems to have bled into Antrim's own.... The Verificationist is a striding tour through one man's addled mind. It's a book that clatters and whirs like a Rube Goldberg device, spitting out, on every page, perfectly formed pellets of intellection, rude humor, grief and longing."
-- The New York Times Book Review

"A darkly comic tour-de-farce that's at once attenuated and hyperkinetic.... Antrim has provided a striking meditation on the nature of self-identity and a fierce affirmation of the power of imagination."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A hilarious send-up of psychoanalysis and a deeply original meditation on the nature of identity."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"Antrim is that rarest of birds, a virtuoso satirist. In The Verificationist he plays the banal against the grotesque, sets a fool's reductionist logic grinding like a tiny wheel against the ceiling of a pancake house, finally opens the exit to the void. Antrim's extraordinary imagination has invited comparison of his work with that of Italo Calvino, but Antrim has a sharper razor, a diamond eye drilling our culture and time. In Antrim's pinball machine the reader ricochets from intellectual pleasure to anxiety to nervous laughter."
-- Annie Proulx

"Donald Antrim is in top form with this high-spirited hallucination, whose characters, undeniably ourselves, carry on engagingly and shamelessly, in an off-the-wall, not to mention off-the-ceiling, environment that is also the world we know, and sometimes wish we didn't."
-- Thomas Pynchon

"The guy has nailed me with his deadpan. Not since the late Donald Barthelme have we had such a pitch-perfect surrealizing of domestic American life, and given the already surreal nature of that life, this is saying something.... Antrim's art is to render the uncanny as if it were the canny. The confessional matter-of-factness of Tom's voice plays beautifully against the preposterous scenario.... A high-altitude view of therapists, sure. One man's existential self-confrontation, okay. More interesting to contemplate, though, is the tension of improbability that Antrim creates ... how vivid he makes that arguably near-universal split between vulnerable inwardness and the utterly implausible momentum of the outer world."
-- Sven Birkerts, Esquire magazine

"He offers another slaphappy narrator on the verge of regression and total crack-up.... Antrim strikes the perfect balance between levity and gravity."
-- Time-Out

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