The Portable Veblen
Ratings8
Average rating4
Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity. As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.
Tags
Genre
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Things I liked about this book: there's wordplay and fun with language; it never gets too cutesy, despite all the squirrels and quirky characters; it doesn't take place in Brooklyn.
It began with a word and a quote.
Seropurulent \ ˌsir-ō-ˈpyu̇r-ə-lənt“He...wanted to sputter Seropurulent! which had been an ironic superlative they used in med school for terrible things that had to be overlooked.”From The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth Mckenzie.
I was browsing through some blog post drafts and I ran across this. The Portable Veblen? I had no memory of reading it. I double-checked Goodreads. No, nothing. But, I quickly learned, The Portable Veblen was on the National Book Awards longlist, and it was available at my public library. And there was a squirrel on the cover. Sold.
This is exactly (EXACTLY!) the sort of book I love. It's about nothing, and it's about everything. The characters are completely flawed and imminently loveable. The conversations are Alice-in-Wonderland-ish-ly strange and brilliant. The format of the story is conventional and yet also mildly surprising. It's humorous, too. And there are squirrel characters.
Let me share a little of the plot.
Veblen (yes, that's a name) is (kind-of) planning to marry Paul, and they are crazy about each other. The chief thing they have in common is that they both come from wildly disfunctional families. Paul has fallen into a fabulous job with a pharmaceutical firm after he has developed a Pneumatic Turbo Skull Punch to treat battlefield head trauma, while Veblen never finished college (should she tell Paul?) and does temp work and has conversations with squirrels.
Okay, I think that's enough.
I'm desperate now to read more by Elizabeth Mckenzie, and it seems she has a small backlist, so off I go.
This novel can be described with the following list of very interesting adjectives: quirky, ironic, karmic, squirrelly, political, joyful, maddening, hilarious, emotional, awkward, and even Pynchonesque at times.
Is your interest piqued? It should be!
I had a good time reading The Portable Veblen. It's bursting with themes that exercised the English major muscles in my brain! There are so many dysfunctional relationships, a hilarious and thought-provoking commentary on marketing and big business and corruption, and an exploration of mental health, all told by a confused but quirky and hilarious narrator named Veblen, who has a love for the environment and a penchant for talking to her squirrel friend.
Let me try to put this story into a nutshell for you (pun intended). Veblen is a 30-ish woman with a love for typing, squirrels, fixing up her cottage, and translating Norwegian. The story begins with a marriage proposal from her boyfriend, Paul. Her thoughts and reaction to the proposal tips you off to the fact that this will not be an ordinary book about an ordinary love story. Especially when there's a squirrel involved.
Read my full review here: http://www.literaryquicksand.com/2016/03/review-the-portable-veblen-by-elizabeth-mckenzie/
