Donald Antrim: An Interview
By Eric Wittmershaus

Donald Antrim hasn't let the praise go to his head.

One of The New Yorker's "20 Writers for the 21^st Century" (June 21, 1999), Antrim is regularly mentioned alongside postmodern heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Donald Barthelme. His second novel, "The Hundred Brothers" (Vintage), now in paperback, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award in 1998. And accolades for his latest, "The Verificationist", haven't been in short supply, either.

Sitting across a table at Saul's Restaurant & Delicatessen in Berkeley, Calif., Antrim ponders what it's like to see blurbs from the likes of Annie Proulx and Pynchon on the jacket of "The Verificationist."

"It's exciting," he says, after a contemplative pause characteristic of the tall, cerebral forty-ish author. But, as is typical of both Antrim's writing and speech, there's a catch. "Though I would say that I don't carry around praise or approbation for very long before I forget it all and feel lost and doomed as usual."

While "doomed" doesn't seem like quite the right adjective for this rising literary star, it would be an apt description of the narrators of his three novels; his first is "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World."

Tom, the voice of "The Verificationist" is a professor of psychoanalysis looking for some direction in his marriage, not to mention his life.

During an informal pancake supper Tom organizes for his colleagues at the fictional Krakower Institute, the narrator's attempt to start a food fight is aborted by Richard Bernhardt, Tom's burly, hyper-masculine colleague. While Bernhardt embraces the n arrator in a homoerotic bear hug and urges him to drop his would-be cinnamon toast missile, Tom has an out-of-body experience.

The hours at the pancake house tick by, and Tom's hold on reality continues to loosen before he experiences what he will no doubt someday describe as a catastrophic catharsis.

But the triumph of "The Verificationist" is how Antrim gets to that catharsis. As he floats and flies about the pancake house, Tom, with remarkable clarity for someone experiencing a nervous breakdown, re-examines his relationships with his colleagues, one of whom may be having an affair with his wife Jane, as well as his childless marriage. All the while, the careful reader will notice the subtle ways in which Antrim uses the dreamlike events unfolding within his novel to make sweeping, clever observations about the world outside of his book.

If Antrim can be said to have a "shtick," it's that he places his leading men in decidedly unreal situations, somehow stringing his readers along without letting us doubt what is taking place. We do not question the reality of an out-of-body experience in which you can talk to and physically interact with those around you. Nor do we wonder how it is that Doug in "The Hundred Brothers" has 99 brothers, let alone how 98 of them, as well as Doug, are able to coordinate their schedules to accommodate a massive meal. It's simply not an issue.

Antrim says he is well aware of how his alternate realities might crumble under scrutiny. This is one of the reasons, he says, you won't find any chapters or text breaks in his novels.

"These books require a fair amount of acceptance on the part of the reader," Antrim says. "There's a suspension of disbelief that has to happen. Not that (the books) are fantastic, but because they're strung together with a certain amount of high tension wire.

"I was afraid (while writing) that if you got out of the narrative with a chapter or a page break, it's a door out. ... Even if you got out for a minute, you would see how flawed and unlikely the thing was.

The staff at The New Yorker and those familiar with Antrim's fluid, surreal narratives might argue otherwise. The author has a knack for allowing his stories to build and grow out of themselves.

"It began with the first book," Antrim says of his semi-stream-of-consciousness style. "These things would seem to just kind of endlessly come out of themselves. There would be no point of a break that reset the novel in some way.

"If new characters are going to appear, or if another Tom is going to come into effect, it has to happen out of what's happening right now. So that affected the way I write them."

The way Antrim writes them also tends to be methodical and without much planning, he says.

"I didn't know what ("The Verificationist") would be at all," he says, before adding that all he started with was a single sentence. "And then, after about a year of puttering around with it, and ... maybe four or five months of really working on it, I got up to about 25 pages or so," he adds.

"Then Tom, the narrator, wound up in the arms of his colleague, and then I thought, right away, almost, 'Could you leave him up there for the whole book? What would that be?"

This careful, sensitive approach to writing is reflected in the way Antrim speaks. Sometimes, he takes an incredibly long time to answer my questions, but when he does, his answer is always well thought-out. It comes as somewhat as a surprise, then, that when the author dicusses the common character traits of his narrators, he does not compare them to himself.

"I suppose these men have in common a certain grandiosity and sensitivity, or kind of an attempt at sensitivity and an attempt to, on their parts, articulate their experiences," he would say. "Sometimes in very elaborate fashion.

This style extends to the author, too. Even his sandwich order at Saul's prompts some small self-examination on Antrim's part, as he explains how he could never get away with adding a tomato to his pastrami and cheese sandwich in his hometown of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Food seems to be a pet subject of Antrim's. There's the obvious setting of The Pancake House & Bar in "The Verificationist." And in "The Hundred Brothers," the narrative unfolds around a dinner 99 of the brothers (one of them is not present) enjoy midway through the novel. In both books, Antrim — and therefore the reader — becomes absorbed in what the author calls "the tyranny of food."

"I came from Southern Protestant families on my mother's side and on my father's side," he says. "The business of having food and eating food is, of course, highly regimented and a sort of hugely important part of the day.

"Maybe I'm reacting to the tyranny of food and preparations and mealtimes, but that wasn't really the case in my house," he concludes, shortly before our food arrives and the tape recorder clicks off for a time, providing you, the reader, with a door out.

E-mail Eric Wittmershaus at ericw at flakmag dot com.

— graphic by Jeffrey Avila