Books: The Portable Veblen By Elizabeth McKenzie (2016)

 

“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.”

The Portable Veblen is one of the quirky novels publishers put out, filled with quirky characters, doing quirky things, talking and having conversations no really has in real life, and everyone seems to like it…because its quirky. I picked this book up years ago from The Last Bookstore in downtown LA. While I do enjoy books that are odd and funny, and I adore satire, it sat on the shelf until recently. I don’t hate the book, but clearly I’m not smart enough to find the humor in McKenzie’s tale, but not smart enough to understand why anything happens in this book. Both Veblen and Paul’s families are dysfunctional –and I really wanted to punch Veblen’s mom every time she popped up in the book. She’s a horrible human being who makes everything about herself and a neutered stepfather who clearly loves his wife and is willing to defend her –even when she does and says something terrible. And let’s not even talk about how damaged both Paul and Veblen really are – but they often come off as the sanest of the group.

It’s not so much a story, but a collection of character studies, most of which I could not connect to. And as a book selling itself as a satire, it truly comes off more as family drama. There some stuff I liked, including Veblen’s obsession with squirrels, but almost everything else was easily skip-pable.