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). ?A book that clatters and whirs like a Rube Goldberg device, spitting out?perfectly formed pellets of intellection, rude humor, grief and longing.??The New York Times Book Review Donald Antrim is the author of two previous novels, The Hundred Brothers and Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. The pancake suppers were my idea. The plan was, as I imagined it, innocent enough: respectful, unceremonious gatherings, one in early spring a few days before Easter, another sometime after the Wicker Beaver Festival in late October, all the teaching analysts coming together as friends, drinking limitless coffee refills, sharing opinions and impressions of the various candidates at the Institute, of crises or patients' breakthroughs in our private practices, of new ideas relating to the seemingly everlasting task of reconciling classical metapsychology to our particular branch of Self / Other Friction Theory. It was my view that the mood at these pancake affairs should be kept light, and I therefore selected, instead of that new, expensive breakfast restaurant on Woodrow Avenue -- Jane had been raving about the food, but I had never set foot inside, for reasons that may be immaterial within the context of the present discussion -- the more modest, open-all-night Pancake House & Bar on Eureka Drive, way out past the book factory, down the perilously steep hill leading to our famous covered bridge and, beyond the bridge, the overgrown, abandoned airfield.
It is true that this meant a long drive for my colleagues who live on the north side. An occasional trip through the city's neglected districts is worth their time and trouble. The Krakower Institute, like any privileged organization, has significant responsibilities toward the community, and I can't help feeling that, despite our peer counseling program for teenaged girls, we do not accomplish enough. That said, allow me to report that our first-ever analysts' pancake party was a monumental success. The sordid, oddly lovely, threateningly intimate and utterly unexpected, mortifying embrace between Richard Bernhardt and yours truly did not spoil the evening in the least. Not appreciably, anyway. Everything depends on how you look at these things. I remember that I ordered blueberry pancakes with Canadian bacon, a large orange juice, and, because this was dinner, a house salad. It was, I recall, a gorgeous evening, one of those ideal early-April nights, the stars already apparent in a sky falling from blue to black, the night air brisk with smells of trash fires smoldering in backyard
