Tom is our narrator -- a seemingly adequately analyzed psychotherapist who, in the course of a nightlong pancake dinner with colleagues, finds himself locked in a bear hug administered by Bernhardt, the towering father figure of the group. Bernhardt is merely trying to keep Tom from a food fight, but the effects are disastrous: in an out-of-body episode, Tom floats up to the ceiling and from there looks down on himself and his cronies. Over the course of the night, he watches as his friendships, his marriage, even his professional identity, unfold and unravel until, in a catastrophic and inevitable tandem ascent and regression, he loses his very sense of himself as a man.

Taking on psychoanalysis and sex, work and family, The Verificationist explodes old myths and creates new ones. It is a wildly imagined, superbly written novel from a writer whose work has been hailed as "gloriously unhinged" (San Francisco Chronicle).