This flying shrink is out of sight, into mind

In Donald Antrim's The Verificationist, a little bit of knowledge is not only dangerous, it's the sort of stuff that will lead its possessor into three layers of nervous breakdown, then spit him through the roof of a pancake house on the outskirts of town.

Tom, the book's protagonist and narrator, is the kind of psychologist who's incapable of turning his job off—everything he experiences gets filtered through his theories on power gamesmanship, father/son pairings, and sexual courtship. Finally, during a dinner with his colleagues at the prophetically absurd "Pancake House & Bar," the clutch in Tom's brain breaks, and he finds his consciousness liberated from his body and suspended in midair, swooping, hovering, and nearly colliding with waitresses.

COURTESY RANDOM HOUSE Tom the psychologist is flipping in a pancake house. And this is a painting of a forest.

This is familiar territory for Antrim, who—in his novels Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World and The Hundred Brothers and the short story "An Actor Prepares"—has told first-person stories about bookish men whose ordinary knowledge carries them toward absurd, terrible conclusions. Much of the comedic juice of The Verificationist, as in these earlier tales, comes from the narrator's banality. Tom tries to sound as reasonable as possible while espousing increasingly ridiculous theories. "The simple question 'What color do you want to paint the upstairs room?'" he reasons, "might, if we follow things to their logical conclusions, be stated: 'How do I live, knowing that I will one day die and leave you?'" Antrim is an expert at maintaining this absurdist tone without letting it slip into out-and-out parody, and his restraint is what makes the book so much fun to read.

Though Antrim's narrative technique, remains superficially the same, in The Verificationist he links his usual apocalyptic farce to the psyche of his main character. Whereas events in Antrim's stories used to be influenced by the occasional happenstance, like the enraged duck that drowns a blind Puck in "An Actor Prepares," The Verificationist whittles everything down to a man and the shell into which he crawls.

The physics of Tom's hallucination are one of the book's enjoyable puzzles: while it's a sustained bear hug from a colleague that propels Tom's psyche out of his body, the other people in the restaurant are capable of seeing and even interacting with Tom's floating, incorporeal form. As Tom picks up a young waitress and takes her flying with him, his colleagues watch and remark, "Look at him up there, Manuel. This can't be a good thing. Tom should act his age and be more professional...he only wants to eat her pussy."

In the early stages of his out-of-body experience, Tom explains, "I felt, for a short while, as if I were becoming what every normal child most truly is: an inventor of reality." It's this insight that drives most of the events that follow: throughout, we see hints that Tom wants to remain a child, from his attempts to start a food fight to his friends' disparaging comments. This impulse, combined with his propensity to mono-maniacally analyze the world in psychological terms, results in Tom's creation of a fantasy world entirely extrapolated from his few short minutes at the pancake restaurant. Slight hints get inflated into signs of long-buried attractions, Tom invents at least three separate father figures, and two separate architectural structures stand in for Tom's mother. By the end of the book, Tom's pancake house has become near-fatally abstracted from reality, and his companions have been rearranged into a tumbling, psychosexual mess.

This is the purest thought-process-as-farce that Antrim has yet managed, and when Tom is in high gear, The Verificationist is a funny, enjoyable novel. Antrim's other characters, however, suffer greatly at the expense of the narrator. This is partly a function of the story's solipsistic nature, but none of the supporting cast are as resonant as in Antrim's previous books. Rebecca, the waitress with whom Tom spends the most time, never has a coherent dialogue style—sometimes she's a churlish trollop, sometimes she's a junior version of Tom. The others are likewise erratic or one-note—they may all be Tom's creations by the end, but just because they were imagined by a boring freak doesn't mean they can't be a little more interesting.

Book

The Verificationist by Donald Antrim Random House 179 pp. $21

That's a minor quibble, however, and with The Verificationist, Antrim has distilled his brand of bizarre academian to its purest form. It's a good conclusion to the trilogy he began with Mr. Robinson and The Hundred Brother, and like those other works, it's a quick sucker-punch of a read—brilliant and horrifying and over too soon.

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