Twenty psychoanalysts and a narrator with a dissociated personality, whose vantage point is the ceiling, meet for dinner in a pancake house. The narrator, Tom, is a seemingly adequately analysed psychotherapist who, in the course of the evening, finds himself locked in a bear hug 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.
Tom is forced into an out-of-body experience, floating up to the ceiling and from there looking down on himself and his companions. Over the course of the evening he watches as his friendships, his marriage and even his professional identity, unfold and unravel until, in a catastrophic finale, he loses the very sense of himself as a man.
Taking on psychoanalysis, sex, work and the family, Donald Antrim 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".
