The Verificationist - Hardcover

Antrim, Donald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375408223 ISBN 13: 9780375408229

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

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).

About this title

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375408223
• ISBN 13: 9780375408229
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192