The Verificationist

by Donald Antrim, George Saunders (Introduction)

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.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, The United States Of America, Book Club, American, Americana

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2000

About the author

Donald Antrim is an American novelist. His first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993. In 1999 The New Yorker named him as among the twenty best writers under the age of forty.

Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to The New Yorker and has written a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers, which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. He is also the author of The Afterlife, a 2006 memoir about his mother, Louanne Self. He has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Antrim is the brother of the artist Terry Leness and the son of Harry Antrim, a scholar of T. S. Eliot. Antrim has been associated with the writers David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, and the visual artist Christa Parravani.

He has taught prose fiction at the graduate school of New York University and was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for spring 2009. Antrim teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Marc Kozak · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book happened to catch me at the exact point in my life where it would be the most uncomfortable.

I get pretty down on myself around my birthday, which I know is pretty ridiculous, but here we are. This most recent one was probably the toughest yet -- without wallowing too much in self-pity, I'll just say that I'm not exactly where I thought I'd be at 31 years of age in terms of my career, finances, creative goals, or most importantly, relationships. I'm acutely aware of time passing these days, and it bums me out. Meanwhile, in many ways, I still behave like a child. I want the comfort and secuirty of adulthood without getting rid of the impetuousness and laziness of someone who just entered college. It's something I need to sort out.

I know I know, we all have our own problems, life is hard, get on with it! So very quickly, I'll say that this book is about a psychologist who is similarly trying to run away from the ledge of adulthood, and is painfully self-aware of the entire process. Antrim's usage of technical psychobabble and bizarre surrealism provides an atmosphere that alternates between hilarious and depressing. It's almost too much time spent inside this guy's head, and I woulnd't even recommend this to anyone.

But it just sounded all too similar to how I think. It's non-stop streams of analysis, on himself, on others, on everything -- his brain just doesn't switch off. Several times it hit too close to home, and I had to put the book down.

I'll end with this particular choice quote, because this review is all over the place and not at all fun: I think a lot about long-term relationships. I've met tons of people who simply don't believe they are possible anymore. That marriage is destined to fail. That two people can't ever be happy together forever. I personally refuse to ever believe that. So I was really hit by the brutality of this section, as the main character's wife adresses their deteriorating relationship. It's long, but hang in there:

I used to love you so much, Tom. It was a simple thing, loving you. I didn't worry about us loving other people. I thought about that, the possibility, but I never worried. I thought I could care for somebody else and still love you. It didn't seem like a problem. You know? Why wouldn't we love other people? Loving other people isn't bad. But it's wrong to think everything won't change. You feel like a different person when you make love with someone new. Falling in love with a new person is a way of becoming a new person. Well, not a new person. A different version of yourself. It's true. That's the wonderful part, and it's the difficulty too, I suppose. I don't want you to be a new person. I always want you to be the man I fell in love with. We're different people and we haven't kept track of who we are. That's why we're in this room, isn't it? This is where we can come to find out who we want to be when things change and we feel strange to each other. I think we each have versions of ourselves that we don't know are in us. Are you scared? Don't be. You're a man and I'm not a girl. Do you remember how young we used to be? We were so young in our twenties. We were children. I was riding the enormous man's bike I used to have, remember? It was about a million billion sizes too big for me, and I was riding on the sidewalk, which you're not supposed to do, and then there you were in front of me and I ran into you. Well, I guess I didn't run into you, did I? You jumped out of the way. What happened? You tripped over the hedge, and that dog came tearing out of the yard on the hill. God. The dog's owner ran after the dog and yelled at us to leave his dog alone and get the hell off his property. All of a sudden, because of that man and his dog, we were united. We were a couple. Think of the ways people meet! I get off my bike and it felt like, "Oh, hello." We walked together, and you were sweet and took my bike and walked it for me, and we weren't paying any attention to where we were going, and the next thing we new it was nighttime and we were in that scary part of town where the book factory is, so we went into that bar, remember, but we didn't drink anything, did we? We ordered club soda, and the bartender turned out to be the father of a kid who beat you up in high school, then later got killed in that terrible loading-dock accident. The father wouldn't stop talking about how death was everywhere, and he got impatient with us for drinking club soda, and we gave him a huge tip, because of his dead son, and just to get out of there. We went right to bed, that night, didn't we? I was afraid to take off my clothes. You kissed my back and told me it was beautiful, my back. I believed you. Do you ever want to be a different kind of man? Could you be a different man with a different woman if I were the woman? Don't be hurt, don;t take it personally. Who else did you fuck, anyway? Tom? Actually, do you want me to tell you something? I'm not sure I want you to say. How would you feel about that? Would you think I don't care? Can you fuck me like I'm all the people you might ever love? Why am I telling you not to be hurt? It's because I want to fuck like I'm everybody and not just me. Is that a crazy thing to want?

[Gary Barwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life, I think, is like eating pancakes at night: full of compulsion, sweetness, regret, heaviness, strange incongruity, and, if the ingredients are just right, a surprising grace.

In this brilliant, witty, and insightful short novel by Donald Antrim, a group of psychologists meet for a pancake supper one evening. Not much happens. They talk both shop & gossip, they flirt and argue, and the narrator, whose narration is rich with astoundingly witty, inventive, insightful, sad, and hopeful language, is held in a bearhug for the almost the entire novel by another psychologist just as he’s about to throw some cinnamon toast across the room. In the hug, he experiences a transcendent, melancholy, beautiful, and hilarious out-of-body – and eventually, out of pancake house – experience.

This modern fable, filled with longing, grief, psychobabble, and psychological insight, amazes on every page, and, despite its depth, leaves one laughing and filled with hope, both for humans and pancakes.

(reposted from my review on the AdventBookBlog.com

[Krok Zero · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't use the P-word lightly, so you can be assured of my certitude when I tell you that this book is some pretentious-ass bullshit.

[Nathanimal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recommend this to the reader with a 2 to 3 hour flight because, like the compact little snack you'll probably get on the flight, this is a compact little book that you could probably finish off before you touch down to wherever you're going. Try starting the book in line at the airline consul and continue reading as you taxi around the runway for take off, then you should leave the ground at just about the same time the narrator does. It'll be like you're living the book! As the summary on the back explains, a little way into the story the narrator, a psychologist, gets bear hugged by his colleague, a bind of such physical and emotional duress that he leaves his body. So, if you time it just right, he'll be floating above his his companions at a pancake dinner (Antrim's idea) right at the same time you'll be floating above all the people and places you know and love (my idea). At altitude, in the pressurized airplane cabin with refined oxygen blasting down at you through your personalized little jet, your head will begin to feel taught and buoyant like a helium balloon. You'll become slightly dizzy and disoriented, but in a completely calm kind of way. And this will amplify the feeling of this very strange book. You may momentarily wonder about the symbols in you find along your way — Boy, the color blue sure seems to mean something here, and, How about the roof of that hospital floating all lit up like a spaceship in the sky? That might definitely mean something. But mostly you'll probably get the sense, as I did, with all the psychobabble of the characters and the exhaustive analyzing of every little thing that nothing is quite as crazy as an excess of rationality.

[Ligeia · Rating 4 out of 5]

o del surrealismo fatto arte


Tom è uno psicologo, e come molti che fanno questo mestiere tende a manipolare, analizzare e attribuire significati un po' a caso
una sera durante una cena coi colleghi in una tavola calda che serve solo pancakes la faccenda assume connotati surreali, certo che se uno psicologo lancia briciole di pane è normale che i colleghi psicologi infantili, essendo lesti a capire i gesti ludici, alzino i menù tutti insieme come un sol uomo per ripararsi, del resto le farneticazioni sui seni della collega sanno un po' di ridondanza per un kleiniano, mentre le fantasie sulla scena primaria fanno tanto antica scuola viennese... :-P

divertissement d'autore, con una buona dose di psicoanalisi e un tocco di cattiveria nel finale, tutto sommato solo per amanti dell'argomento, tutti gli altri si potrebbero addormentare a pagina 35, o forse no, e potrebbero scoprire un'inaspettata passione per le seghe mentali della categoria più bistrattata e temuta delle scienze sociali :-P

[Sabra Embury · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the Postal Service's Such Great Heights pops into your head more than once while reading The Verificationist don't be surprised, since most of the story takes place in the cloud layer of a pancake house. The protagonist--whose lengthy astral projection is the result of a homoerotic bear hug: floats as he admires his server, thinks about his wife, picks apart his co-workers, all while provoking a few debates within his introspective search for a comfortable state of maturity.

Antrim's brand of meandering (in this third novel) is comparable to Nicholson Baker's Room Temperature, only a lot more analytical, opposed to Baker's tangents of mundanity dipped in gold leaf. It's a brief ride, too--at 179 pages. Reading it in one sitting is advisable to keep the momentum going, since everything happens in one long breath.

[Jeb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Antrim is one of my favorite writers, but he had more fun with this book than I did as a reader. George Saunders' intro nails it: the writer is like a dog rolling around in the grass without a care in the world. Which is both delightful and, ultimately, tiresome.

Still, I'm glad I read the book. Its humanity and humor are indispensable, and, like the Hundred Brothers, written amazingly in real time with only minor reflections on the past.

I don't resent being frustrated by a great writer like Antrim and don't take his exhausting playfulness personally. Books don't have to be perfect to be worthwhile.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

And now, a scene from the Simpsons that encapsulates my feelings towards this book:

Moe has radically remodeled his bar, and it is now filled with assorted eurotrash, yuppies and pseudo-hipsters. Homer and friends appear at the grand re-opening and are taken aback by the crowd and environment. Looking up at a TV above the bar that is showing an image of an eyeball blinking and looking wildly around, they ask him what the hell it's for. "It's po-mo" says Moe. This elicits no reply from the guys. "You know, post-modern?" Silence. "Weird for the sake of weird."

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE VERIFICATIONIST by Donald Antrim is a comic novel that spews from the mind of the psychologist narrator over the course of one night as he attends an annual pancake dinner with his colleagues. To say more about this sendup of baby men, psychology and sex would spoil the surprises within. Commit yourself!

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Splendid. All the good things said of this book I can confirm are true. It's like the mind of Marcus, the spirit of Vonnegut, and the body of Barthelme. I love that I can still discover authors like this, and I look forward to finding the rest of his slim oeuvre.

[João Reis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A ideia é boa, a execução má. Não funciona. Livro mal martelado. A tradução não ajudou.

[Andrew]

I honestly don't know how I feel about The Verificationist. On the one hand, I found it to be rather silly, with the sort of tryhard sense of humor found in New Yorker columns by self-styled "humorists" (read: unfunny people who write in such a way that it reads as humor, even if your lips fail to crack a smile), and a dull, dull premise that didn't even seem like it could lead somewhere interesting. On the other hand, Donald Antrim tried to do something unique. Most American writers don't. I didn't much care for it, but you might. As for me, I'll need to read more Antrim's work to know if I like his writing.

[Benjamin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes a book makes you appreciate how hard it must be to write a really great book.

[Marc Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsE4t...

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antrim is the master of the casually bizarre. In crisp, fact-laden descriptions, he gives the reader a perfectly ordinary world scarred by just one or two total strokes of insanity, making his short books both archly comic and deeply unsettling. A genealogy of his influencers could include Charlie Kaufmann, Woodie Allen's neurotic monologues, and Kafka's Metamorphosis, but you don't really need to go past Donald Barthelme (Antrim discusses this in a wonderful retrospective by John Jeremiah Sullivan in last week's NYT). Antrim takes the mischevious surrealism of Barthelme's Sixty Stories and extends it with meticulous, lapidary prose and (in this case) a heavy dose of psychoanalytic tradition.

The plot of this short novel concerns an insecure psychiatrist convening a meeting of his colleagues at a local breakfast restaurant. Intimidated by their seemingly greater confidence, anxious over his unravelling marriage (and raising questions about his sexuality), he narrates the novel in tones of increasing hysteria (always, though, with witty and original language). The overbearing criticism of a father figure colleague, and the possibility of redemption glimpsed via a beautiful teenage waitress, bring him to some sort of critical decision point regarding his life. Saying any more about the plot would spoil it.

Going back to Kafka, what defines 'Kafkaesque' seems to be different to everyone, but to me it must include an oppressive yet genteel atmosphere: the suggestion of paranoia on the part of the protagonist. The uniquely Modern sensation of being out of the loop, unable to grow up and adjust to the exigencies of adult life, because the tools we were given no longer work. Confronted even by ordinary situations - choosing between eggs or pancake at a diner, say - the character feels alienated and inadequate. By this measure, The Verificationist positively oozes Kafka's vapors.

Most of my reading this year has been characterised by wild slashes at the overgrowth of world and experimental literature I have yet to cover, so it speaks to the weird, energetic appeal that Antrim casts that I was drawn to read another of his books just a month after reading his first, Elect Mr Robinson For A Better World. (He has a new book out, but I'm not made of money.) I wasn't disappointed.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the few American novels I've read more than once, and one of even fewer published in the last 30 years that doesn't make me want to hold my head under a massive magnet until it erases all knowledge I have of the language. I first read the excerpt that was published in the new yorker in 99 or 2000 and couldn't believe that they actually published a decent piece of fiction. Astonishing. I waited for the book to come out and it far exceeded what the excerpt set up. So much humor plus intelligence, which always equals accurate absurdity for me. He paints a picture of day to day life as a vacillation between meaningful and meaningless failures.
Here are some nice quotes from it:

Choices between banalities are some of our more intimidating ordeals in life.

Best to understand Bernhardt’s criticisms and complaints[…] as nothing more than self-administered medications against the man’s own terror of vitality, autonomy, playfulness, the life force in any form.

I believe in unlikely and unexpected affinities transacted between objects in a room.

What is more quiet than that silence heard from skunks and raccoons before a downpour?

Jane is satisfied and happy, a condition she masks by acting fidgety and uncertain.

[John Pappas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regarded only through the lenses of magic realism or surrealism, this book is a hilarious (albeit in an entirely disturbing and discomfiting manner) and occasionally poignant story of an adult male trying to simultaneously avoid and claim his status as a man. But Antrim seems to not be writing a narrative only about this character's dream-like journey (or lack thereof). His deft use of these techniques to heighten the disassociative state of the narrator, to lend it greater realness and credence, creates a much more interesting character, yes, but also a character with much greater satirical power and function. As such, Antrim's book becomes a metafictional comment on the growing body of literature (I'm looking at you Russo, Walter, Delillo, et al.) featuring educated bumblers -- self-absorbed, self-sabotaging manchildren who use scholarship, not as a way to embrace the world, but as a means of avoidance. By poking fun at the tropes of these novels through the protagonist's sometimes prescient and sometimes misguided self-analysis (he is a psychologist, of course), overwrought rationalizations and compensation mechanisms, Antrim critiques the societal expectations of middle-aged men and the popular literature written about their struggles. Hysterical, in all senses of the word.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most successful novels in terms of employing surreal approaches. One reason seems to be that the novel's surreality is introduced gradually, and the author manages to make it seem both real and the protagonist's fantasy in the midst of what appears to be a nervous breakdown. It is both funny and sad, and yet not too funny nor too sad. What is also wonderful about the novel's surreality is that it is very limited -- e.g., the protagonist floating up toward the ceiling of a pancake house, and being joined there progressively by others -- and that it provides a point of view, physically and emotionally, to describe the other characters, as distorted as that description might be. But isn't all description, from the first-person point of view, distorted? Here that distortion is given wings. It is apt, and it is this aptness that, in the end, makes the surreality work.

[Marco Kaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild, funny and dreamlike in the truest sense (in that, at the end, you are left scratching your head, wondering what it means). But there are so many great moments. Antrim is clearly toking off the Saunders bong. If I had to guess at what this book is about, and it's one of those books where the author's genius is foregrounded, I would say the Verificationist is about the impossibility and subsequent infinite longing for human connection, as well as the sadness that results when someone looks at his or her life with a magnifying glass. Not for everyone. But for those who want unconventional, here is unconventional done well.

[Joe Stewart · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is both pretentious and vapid. The plot is bland, the characters remain undeveloped, and any/all metaphors are sloppy and disgusting. The narrator spends 90% of this novel in an “out of body experience” where he attempts to seduce a high school student who has the misfortune of being his waitress. I do not recommend this book.

[Post Scriptum · Rating 2 out of 5]

Insomma, paragonarlo a Calvino...

[Kion You · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most original living American novelists…and his depictions of characters undergoing mental health crises is second to none

[Will Salzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up from the used bookstore on a total whim because I liked the cover, and I was pleasantly surprised with it! One of the better satires of psychoanalysis I’ve read, the opening pages give some promise of a modern day Camus but it evolves into something completely novel.

“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.”

“What could it mean to be gazed at by a lonely dog inscribed on the neck of a girl vomiting in midair?”

[Chloe Sproule · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was funny but I couldn't stand the psychobabble. Also, went on for much longer than it needed to.

[Betty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ik ben niet onwillig om te zweven, maar dan mag het iets meer zijn (en daarmee kent u mij al een beetje).

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unconsciously continuing a cacophony of unconventional 'contes' (had to be a 'c'-word, and I couldn't be bothered looking for a better word).

'Cause this is definitely unconventional: 20 psychologists meet at a pancake place and the narrator gets caught in a bear-hug and catapults into flight/nervous breakdown. A stream-of-consciousness-like story, full of humour as well. Those 4 stars are actually pretty big---

[Kane Powell · Rating 4 out of 5]

freaky ass white boy

[Michael David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's funny: although the book is by no means a difficult novel to read, I failed to read it thrice. I think it's largely because it has no chapters: it's one long, rambling omphaloskepsis of a man who is radically familiar with his own failures and shortcomings. Although he's a psychoanalyst, he still resorts to juvenile pranks such as food fights, and fails at communicating properly with his spouse: his conceptual understanding of psychology has not translated into its application toward authentic communication.

Prior to him instigating another food-fight, however, he is held tightly in a bear hug by one of his rival psychologists, who only seeks to maintain order in their meeting. Although Bernhardt fails at this goal (as the other psychologists devolve into a bacchanalia of sorts), Tom (the protagonist) has an out-of-body experience where he reflects both as observer and participator on his own shortcomings and his suspicions regarding his peers.

I think fundamental in Antrim's novel is his tacit implication that even psychologists are also fickle human beings, despite their familiarity with the human mind. Most of them are still tempted by lust, and most are still self-consumed with their own shortcomings. They are no different from other humans.

Tom himself comments, quite insightfully, that "people, no matter how beautiful or desirable, invariably will, if observed closely while going about their daily business of keeping alive, begin to seem like monsters." (p. 22)

This is a Jungian concept that was restated by Antrim, and which I've also tried to internalize in my daily life. For the most part, I'm quite a serious person, and I take responsibility seriously. But understanding the shadow has allowed me to be more forgiving toward myself, and now I allow myself to have a more enjoyable diet, and a more healthy perspective regarding sexuality. I have also honed my own sense of humor, dark and sarcastic it may be, to create laughter in people whom I consider friends. By familiarizing myself with my own darkness, I have created a spigot with which to release a bit of it without this darkness consuming me.

It's taken me years and a firmer goal to finally finish the book, but The Verificationist, while imperfect, remains to be a trenchant commentary on man's fallibility.

[Julien · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a feeling this is the sort of book you'll either like or detest. Antrim has a peculiar tone. In all of his books, the humor/interest stems from a deadpan, pedantic, seemingly logical narrator being placed in a surreal, nonsensical environment. In this book, the narrator spends most of his time hallucinating that he is floating and flying around a pancake restaurant while his colleagues (college psychology professors) eat and chat below him. There are also flashbacks about awkward sex with his wife, bowel movements, and a relatively uneventful Revolutionary War battle (and its historical reenactment) that took place in the town. The book is often quite funny and unpredictable, though meandering and occasionally tedious.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite how much I look for strange fiction, this is one of the more unique novels I've managed to come across in a long time. It's premise, it's style, it's language, it's characters, it's everything are as fresh and interesting as anything I've seen in a long time. It is a real pleasure to read. I just got into it right form the first page and remained just as interested all the way through. There is wonderful humor as well. Really, it is a wonderful book.