Amazon.com 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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In his first two novels, Antrim addressed the individual's place in society (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World) and in the family (The Hundred Brothers). Now he challenges the very notion of the individual, in another darkly comic tour-de-farce that's at once attenuated and hyperkinetic. In a small and nameless northeastern city, a group of psychoanalysts has convened at the local Pancake House & Bar for a casual dinner and discussion of their shared specialty--significantly, "Self/Other Friction Theory." The dinner has been organized by the narrator, Tom, who seems stuck in an adolescent stage of development: he spits water at his colleagues, props trash cans against their office doors and, here at the restaurant, wants to launch a decisive food fight against the child psychologists. But before he can throw his cinnamon-raisin toast, he's confined in the monstrous embrace of Richard Bernhardt, the group's father figure. Hoisted in the air, Tom suffers a literal loss of self, as an out-of-body experience leaves him floating near the restaurant ceiling. From this vantage point, simultaneously self and other, Tom watches as the dinner evolves into a series of arguments and seductions. Tom details these scenes minutely--"It is my hope," he says, "to make a picture of things as they were... and, through this process... say something worthwhile about what I call the verifiability of emotional experience"--yet there are tantalizing hints throughout that everything he's witnessing is an extended fantasy, all in his disembodied head. Antrim is a manic prose stylist, capable of balancing lush pastoral descriptions with outrageous turbocharged riffs on sex and marriage and psychoanalysis, and the novel hurtles toward its resolution at such breakneck speed that it's perhaps unsurprising when it ends on an abrupt and inconclusive note. Despite this minor letdown, Antrim has provided a striking meditation on the nature of self-identity and a fierce affirmation of the power of imagination. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
