Flak Magazine: Review of The Verificationist, 04-01-00

If Donald Antrim weren't so talented, it might be difficult to decide whether to fault him for seemingly sticking to a formula in his latest novel, "The Verificationist."

After all, isn't this book, like previous two, "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World" and "The Hundred Brothers" right around the 200 page mark, and free of chapter and text breaks?

And what's with his narrators, all middle-aged white guys, prone to speaking in the first person and analyzing things to death? Not to mention the fact that "The Hundred Brothers" and "The Verificationist" both essentially take place before, during and after one meal. Structurally, they're the literary equivalent of dinner theater.

All this criticism becomes irrelevant, however, once you actually sit down and start to read a Donald Antrim Novel. The author's flair for narrating the little histories and dramas of each of his demographically similar narrators essentially renders them as much alike as say, RuPaul and Marilyn Monroe. And as for the lengths of the books, Antrim's wild and fantastic scenarios would be difficult to maintain for much over 200 pages. There, the threat of losing his reader to boredom begins to emerge.

And fans of Antrim certainly don't want to read less when they've waited so patiently for a new book, do they?

So here we have Antrim's third novel, which appears on the surface quite similar to his novels of yore, but is in fact, different enough to hopefully once again garner the author the same award nominations "The Hundred Brothers" did back in 1998.

Set inside the open-all-night Pancake House & Bar, in a burg vaguely reminiscent of Don DeLillo's nameless college town in "White Noise," "The Verificationist" is the result of what happens when a group of psychoanalyst-academics from the fictional Krakower Institute gets together for pancakes and a chat.

We view the proceeding from the vantage point of Tom, the organizer of the dinner, who's perched oh-so-precariously on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

The meal is not long underway when the mischievous Tom, known for his spontaneous, childish antics, attempts to start a food fight. But he instead finds himself in the restricting, homoerotic embrace of his father-like colleague Richard Bernhardt, who urges him to drop the cinnamon toast he was preparing to launch rocket-like at a colleague.

The strength of Bernhardt's hold, something in the pancakes or maybe just plain old fate causes Tom to have an out-of-body experience. He floats up from his seat.

While Tom flies about the room — and takes a brief journey outside of the pancake house with his waitress — we observe him re-examining his relationship with his colleagues, the future of his childless marriage and, ultimately, his entire being.

Antrim's ability to wow centers around the rambling, analytic way in which Tom, a psychoanalyst by trade, views the world around him. With its drawn-out sentences and lack of text breaks — not to mention its theme — the book resembles, structurally and thematically, the stream-of-consciousness you might find flowing under Ambrose Bierce's "Owl Creek Bridge." But Tom's analytic point-of-view sets him noticeably apart from Bierce's Confederate soldier Peyton Farquhar.

In a recent interview, Antrim spoke of the "high tension wire" necessary to construct his wild, improbable, chapter-free narratives. And it's not difficult, while reading "The Verificationist," to imagine its author balanced on that wire, just beyond your eyesight's limits, riding a unicycle and juggling oranges.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)