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Rating: 
Summary: Taking the novel to a new place
Review: Somehow I think the definitive novel is one that is free to say anything about anything as Antrim does here and in his other novels. The trick is( or the art is) if its enjoyable and interesting. Antrim 'Verificationist' takes writing freedom to it's limits in a wonderful spell-binding way.Strange, beautiful, very funny masterpiece. It seems perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Out of Body Experience in a Pancake House
Review: This 179-page novella is in a way the stream of consciousness of Tom, a middle-aged pyschologist who, meeting with his colleagues in a lower end pancake house, tries to start a food fight when a rival colleague, a burly man with a swollen ego, puts our narrator in a bear hug upon which Tom has an out of body experience in which he does a glorious exposition on the nature of pancake houses. The real business of this absurd (I mean that as a compliment), allegorical novel is to poke fun at the human need for safety, for mother, for the womb, all embodied by the pancake house. Tom's quest for a mother in the metaphorical sense compels him to invite his colleagues at this pancake emporium every year or so where they try to mend the their bruised egos, a quest that backfires. Antrim's major conflict in the novel is the human drive for safety vs. our utter sense of helplessness in this metaphysical parody, which showcases Antrim's brilliant writing skills. Why only four stars? Because after about 100 pages, I grew a bit tired of the metaphysical explorations. Similar themes are pursued with far more intensity and efficacy in my opinion in Antrim's 20-page essay, "I Bought a Bed," published in Best American Essays 2003.
Rating:
Summary: Great experimental yet accesible novel
Review: This book is not for everyone, but it was an inspirational delight to me. It's so nice to read something so playful. To me it comes across like a fun intellectual flight of fancy. Basically, a neurotic man attends a pancake dinner which he orgnized for his fellow clinical psychologists. When it comes his turn to order, he is panicked by indecision. Soon he gets a mischiveous urge to start a food fight, and a colleague restrains him in a bear hug. He apparently has a nervous breakdown, because for the rest of the evening--and the rest of this zippy novel--he has something like an out-of-body experience, flying near the ceiling looking down on the events of the rest of the evening, thinking about his relationships, and imagining a scenario where he flies away with the waitress--to the local Revolutionary War burial mound. Yet he's also locked tight in Bernhardt's grip all evening. It makes no sense, because neither scenario feels like the literal truth (how could he be held in a suffocating lock all night?)--but it works. Now that's the setup, which is interesting enough, but what I like is the zany way it allows the author to create a character unbounded by normal rules of realism. We see the workings of a mind that is very educated yet comically and wildly lacking in self-awareness. A psychologist who's an utter psychological mess. Every ten pages or so I found myself laughing out loud at--they're too unusual to call them punchlines--moments when this contradiction comes through pointedly. (It cracks me up that his escapist fantasies are as messed up as his real life.) The author writes hilariously about a modern Peter Pan's life, riffing on the New England town he lives in, with its brand new hospital with the Egyptian pyramid-style top and its book warehouse, and its amusingly trivial role in Revolutionary War history. It's the kind of story where people court one another with remarks like, "Was that the documentary on Madagascar, by any chance?...With the tree lemurs?" or "Are you saying that people have UFO sightings as a substitute for working through their sexual hysterias?" The novel reminds me a bit of the writing of Mark Leyner but also Italo Calvino, a great combination. Can't wait to read his earlier novel.
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