About: The Verificationist

The Verificationist is a 2000 novel by American author Donald Antrim. The novel follows the conversations, fantasies, and the emotionally dissociated states of a group of psychoanalysts gathered during a nocturnal pancake supper. The narrator’s predilection for starting food fights and instigating mayhem leads Bernhardt, the most grotesque and overbearing from among his colleagues, to hold him around his midsection almost for the duration of the novel while the narrator (named 'Tom') hallucinates himself hovering over the crowd. The New York Times called it, "A Freudian free-for-all," and George Saunders hailed it as, "one of the most pleasure-giving, perverse, complicated, and addictive novels in the past 20 years," in his article for Salon, which later became the book's introduction.