The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Verificationist by Donald AntrimPaul Maliszewski
Donald Antrim. The Verificationist. Knopf, 2000. 179 pp. $21.00.
Tom, the narrator of Donald Antrim’s latest novel, is a clinical psychologist, faculty member at the Krakower Institute, advocate of its Young Women of Strength teen counseling program, and the organizing force behind his department’s getting together for dinner at the Pancake House & Bar. As in his first two novels, Antrim writes comically about a man who is trying to understand his life using the sharpest analytical tools he can muster: in The Hundred Brothers the narrator optimistically applies ancient myth to a family get-together; in The Verificationist the tools are psychology’s. For neither narrator are the results promising.
Tom’s analysis of conversation over platefuls of pancakes and French toast seems far-fetched at best. When a colleague asks how his wife is, Tom is unable to answer: “Why was I unable to respond with a simple, perfunctory answer to this meaningless, polite question? It was because I was intuitively aware that Escobar wanted to make love to my wife, and I was therefore reluctant to allow him access to her, even through me—especially through me.” Welcome to I’m Not Okay, I’m Simply Not Okay.
But Tom can’t really help himself; analyzing exhaustively is what he does. Flummoxed by the choice between blueberry pancakes and Eggs Benedict, Tom unleashes a gloriously neurotic three-page interior monologue about decisions, loss, and how “choices between banalities are some of the most intimidating ordeals in life.” The only way Tom can shirk the responsibility of analysis is to escape life’s responsibilities and act like a child. His only way out is to start an interdepartmental food fight. Tom has good reasons: “The pancake symbolizes our escape from respectability; eating as a form of infantile play. . . . The Pancake House restores us to beloved infancy!” The Verificationist unfolds the funny, fruitless, and impossible ambition of one man to sustain himself on sugar-fueled fantasies and dodge gravity in all its forms. [Paul Maliszewski]