The Verificationist
Donald Antrim's third novel takes place almost entirely inside the head of Tom, a psychoanalyst at a late-night meeting of fellow analysts at a pancake house. Tom tries to start a food fight, is bear-hugged into submission by a colleague, and spends the rest of the book aloft in his captor's arms, drifting through memories, fantasies, marital grievances, and theoretical asides. The setup is absurd. The execution is exact. Antrim writes with the precision of a watchmaker and the comic timing of a great stand-up, mining the inner life of a man whose profession is the inner life. Beneath the slapstick is a serious meditation on intimacy, restraint, and the strange comfort of being held. Slim, strange, and very funny, it is a high point of late-90s American comic fiction.
What you might want to know about The Verificationist
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
At a late-night pancake house gathering of psychoanalysts, a man is restrained mid-tantrum and floats off into reverie.
The Verificationist was written by Donald Antrim, published in 2000 by Picador.
The Verificationist is 192 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Verificationist takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
The Verificationist is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
