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...

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.

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 d...

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...

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.

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...

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 Ant...

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. "...

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!

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...

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...

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 di...

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 Sulli...

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 a...

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 panc...

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.

Okay, to say I read this book is an overstatement. I just . . . could . . . not . . . finish it. I tried, but I couldn't do it. It was just too absurdist for me. The story is told by a psychologist and takes place during a dinner of psychologist coworkers at a local diner. Maybe if you were a psychologist you would be amused by it??? I was not.

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

A thoroughly pleasing nugget.

Possibly the Longest "New Yorker" Piece EverThis is the sort of book about which it is almost impossible to say anything helpful to a potential reader. As can be seen from the blurbs and other reviews, all one can do is pile up superlatives and admiring, or dismissive, adjectives. The New Yorker once named Antrim one of the "twenty under forty" to watch, and one is tempted to ask, (to paraphrase a Big Bang Theory character), "twenty what under forty what?".The book has no plot, and only a single...

Nifty, smart and absurdly crazy!Antrim has created, with his extraordinary imagination, a sharp-razor-off-the-wall literary work that is amazingly full of rude humor, grief, and longing to capture the domestic American life in a pitch-perfect surrealizing atmosphere!For instance, the narrator, Tom, views much of the book's action from the perspective of the pancake house's ceiling..!!Oh, yea!*From the Inside Flap:"With" The Verificationist, Donald Antrim, acclaimed author of The Hundred Brothers...

A verificationist is one who believes only in what can be verified objectively. But in this novel, the narrator's perceptions run contrary to the objective reality that (I believe!) we, sane readers, share. In fact, the narrator experiences two versions of reality, neither of which is believable, nor is the third version, which is of the first two both being real simultaneously. What is "really" happening in this pancake house & bar and vicinity? As a hint, there's a nearby hospital, which appea...

This is the sort of book I'm supposed to like, but it left me cold inside. Antrim is a sharp and clever author who crafted some bleakly humorous scenes and developed the pacing and plot so they galloped along quickly. But the main character came across as the worst sort of Woody Allen and Nick Hornby hybrid: another man-child who didn't want to grow up, refused to talk to his long-suffering partner about real issues in their relationship, and creepily chased after a barely legal woman half his a...

This book is really weird. There were things I loved and things I didn't quite connect with here, so overall a mixed bag. The premise of this book is that a troubled psychologist goes out to dinner with his coworkers at a pancake restaurant. He decides to throw a piece of toast, gets put in a bear hug by another coworker to stop him from throwing the toast, and then he ends up having an out of body contemplative experience for the next 150 pages or so. The main character Tom is struggling with a...

This book was as symbolically obvious as it was muddled and confusing. While the concept was cool, the execution could have been better. Plus the world doesn't need another story of an older man seeking for answers and solice in pubescent girl.

When will these people get out of this pancake house???

did not enjoy

Fast, surrealist, and fun read. The protagonist's voice is clinical and authoritative and pairs well against the ridiculous events that occur in a Pancake House.

This is the third time I've read this book.

I enjoyed shifting clouds, dots on back, eyes of dog in jan brueghel painting, analysis of breakfast foods, levitation. I did not enjoy the paranoid sexuality, the nervous jocularity of the speaker.