If this is what post-modern lit is all about, I'd rather be a pre-classicist. This book is essentially one big chapter about a hundred brothers reuniting for a dinner. What follows is a series of squabbling between brothers that is at most incoherent. The prose is really bad, with exaggerations and flowery words (more like a Venus flytrap). Donald Antrim seems to have written the book in one night, because the events don't make sense. My advice is start with one brother, and go up from there. Leave this bin of mumbo jumbo for graduate students and intellectual snobs. Post-modernism is reserved for you after you're dead.

Donald Antrim is profoundly original, as he continues to take the novel to a new place in literature. Not always a easy read but always fun and full of insights. I do like 'The Verificationist' and 'The Elect Mr. Robinson' better, but as in all his books it is unlike any book one has ever read.Each brother gave me thoughts on myself my family and the world.I love his dark humor. I'm looking forward to his next book.

In the post colonial imagination, Donald Antrim's phenomologically astute and wonderfully presumptuous masterpiece, The Hundred Brothers, shifts the mode of discourse and the construction of subjectivity. As Freud has said, "Repetition is the mother of invention." We will never look at the "eye" in the "I" or the "I" in the "eye" the same way again. Indeed, in Antrim's (re)reading of the intertextual interstices of familiar familial patterns, it is possible to detect a devout, entymological humanism. In a world where the anxiety of influence can lead to the paradise of delirium, the best one can hope for is voyeuristic narrative pleasure. In all his novels Antrim is clearly determined to unlock the poststructuralist connundrum/enigma. Because Antrim so successfully navigates the narrative of despair the reader is left with not only metaphorical satiation, but the full realization of the global nature of narrative promise. As Freud has said, "repetition is the mother of invention."

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.

I loved this little book so much I read it twice back to back. It is rich, funny, sympathetic, ferociously intelligent and -- despite what some reviewers have said -- does not trail off at the end. In fact, it ends perfectly and logically, a fact that becomes more and more obvious as you re-read it. A dazzling brainy delight.

Having read some of the reviews posted here, I felt compelledto write something about this book... The Verificationist is a trulyrefreshing book to read, and it lives up to the high praise it has received. I am particularly struck by the author's ability to unravel complicated states of being in a manner that is believable and at the same time representative of the symbolic blockages we experience in daily life; predicated by the non-communication of the spiritual (for lack of a better term) and the material, the essential and the supefluous (e.g., the conquest of the former by the latter). Antrim understands neurosis (or is it normalcy?)--and he's composed a tableau of what has become so prevalent in the contemporary, late-babyboomer--a state of hobbled, quotidian psychosis. So, yes, this book is not for the phlegm-headed--nor is it for those who limit their diet to the (mostly) 19th-century novel (although it continues down the same road established by the likes of Sterne, Fielding, and, indeed, even as Eliot would have it later on)--but The Verificationist is most certainly for anyone who wants to take the time to learn about the state of the novel today...This is one of the better examples of what can happen when everything goes right.

Such unpleasantness! And to what end?

The same old, "Yea, the deepest ring of Hell is Suburbia" nihilism; (the pet musing of all college freshmen away from home for the first time).

And that over-the-top, gross-out violence -- written in the pat ironic tone, of the guy who's SEEN IT ALL, and you have NO IDEA of the depths of human depravity...

Well I'm a little maxed out on this theme, and the nastiness at the end seems pointless, grotesque, and redundant.

Still, it had some nice bits, and I like the start of the '100 brothers', so I'll try that; but overall I'd say: this particular 90's trend/theme must be almost used up, right?

Suburban life is barbaric. I think John Updike and a bunch of other guys (and a few women) told us that a long time ago. Mr. Antrim's twist is to juxtapose brutish, post-apocalyptic behavior with the repressed mannerisms of the self-satisfied bourgeoise. The protagonist has a fascination with medieval torture devices and never *dreams* that when his advice is sought on the matter that it will be put to practical use. He runs into one of his former star students in the middle of a public park ... that has been landmined by neighbors that have literally declared war on each other.

The most interesting part of the book was the regression therapy theme. Mr. Robinson's wife regresses quite comfortably down the phylogenetic ladder to her aboriginal coelocanth-essence. Mr. Robinson rather messily reverts to bison-essence, but his co-dependence on his wife is manifested by his bison's near-drowning in her coelocanth ocean. This is all wonderfully bizarre and animistic. By contrast the sort of sans-superego Freudian society that is portrayed in the rest of the book is a joke that gets kind of old.

Donald Antrim is a wonderful original writer who takes the novel to a new and dark place unlike any book you will ever read. Black humor mixed with painful insights on us all it explores the paradoxical world of insanity and real suburban life in a very funny way.