The Verificationist: A Novel

by Donald Antrim

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679769439
• ISBN13: 9780679769439
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.5" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

Taking the novel to a new place

Somehow I think the definitive novel is one that is free to say anything about anything as Antrim does here and in his other novels. The trick is( or the art is) if its enjoyable and interesting. Antrim 'Verificationist' takes writing freedom to it's limits in a wonderful spell-binding way.Strange, beautiful, very funny masterpiece. It seems perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read.

Donald Antrim - Brooklyn's Answer to Tolstoy

This tour de force depicts one night in the life of a debauched Fruedian psychoanalyst who caters to the problems, parameters, issues, obligations, and overt manias, mindsets, and mumblings of adolescent females in today's society. An astute observer of human nature, the waitress who attempts to serve pancakes to Antrim's narrator, has dark eyebrows and a certain delightful savoir faire which is sure to intoxicate busboys and readers alike. Though young, she engages in what I'll call "a flight of the fancy" with the narrator, who undergoes the travails of an uneasy intellect obliged to run in the rat race of the contemporary psychiatric establishment until it is released to soar above the merely ordinary and dares to "just connect!"

Being not for everyone is what makes it for me

It's easy to see why someone may not like this book -- it doesn't really have a standard plot, and it goes back and forth between reality and fantasy. Traditional storytelling is just too important to most readers. Also, it is, at its core, a book about psycho-therapy, and certainly people have widely and wildly differing opinions on that. But the book has one of the most honest, open, and searching narrators to come down the pike in many a moon. I particularly loved that he was willing to fearlessly discuss intellectual matters, something new fiction does less and less frequently these days. And if it rests on intellectualism to be funny, what's wrong with that? To the extent that these are not the tactics of most pop ficiton writers today, whom all seem to write for a far lower common denominator, this is somewhat risky writing. Obviously, the writer is more concerned with telling this character's story than with crafting something that's going to go over with a mass audience. All of which made me love this book. It's not for everyone, but neither is fine wine, nor the Marx Brothers.

Best novel I've read this year.

I loved this little book so much I read it twice back to back. It is rich, funny, sympathetic, ferociously intelligent and -- despite what some reviewers have said -- does not trail off at the end. In fact, it ends perfectly and logically, a fact that becomes more and more obvious as you re-read it. A dazzling brainy delight.

Brilliantly funny

Reading Antrim is proof positive of the adage that you can't dissect or explain humor. His stuff is just preposterously funny and unique. He had a short story in the NYer not long ago (and this is how I discovered him) about a lascivious high school teacher staging Shakespeare with students and I still can't think of it without laughing. This novel is the same way. Yet I can't "explain" the humor. It owes something, maybe, to Nabokov's Pale Fire and the voice of the grandiose, deluded, hilarious Charles Kinbote--but that's pretty imprecise. Antrim is his own thing, and he's a great discovery. A heartbreaking work of staggering humor.