Portable Veblen (McKenzie)

The Portable Veblen 
Elizabeth McKenzie, 2016
Penguin
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594206856


Summary
Nominated, 2016 National Book Awards

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 fiance 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 tete-a-tete 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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 24, 1958 (?)
• Raised—near Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-Santa Cruz; M.A., Stanford University
• Currently—lives in Santa Cruz, California


Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of the novel The Portable Veblen (2016), the collection, Stop That Girl (2005), short-listed for The Story Prize, and the novel MacGregor Tells the World (2007), a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was an NEA/Japan US-Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010.

She received her BA from University of California-Santa Cruz and her MA from Stanford. She was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford's school of continuing studies. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
One of the great pleasures of reading Elizabeth McKenzie is that she hears the musical potential in language that others do not—in the manufactured jargon of economics, in the Latin taxonomy of the animal kingdom, even in the names of our own humble body part.... Her dialogue has real fizz and snappity-pop. It leaves a bubbled contrail. Ms. McKenzie's ear is not her only asset. There is also her angled way of seeing things. The hats on all of her characters sit slightly askew. The Portable Veblen, Ms. McKenzie's second novel, may be her most cockeyed concoction to date…. It's a screwball comedy with a dash of mental illness; a conventional tale of family pathos; a sendup of Big Pharma; a meditation on consumption, marriage, the nature of work….The Portable Veblen is a novel of such festive originality that it would be a shame to miss.
Jennifer Senior - New  York Times Book Review


Irresistibly comedic…. McKenzie…has an appealingly light, playful touch…. The Portable Veblen is about how very squirrelly family dysfunction can be—and about how, as many of us never get tired of reading, love sometimes can conquer all.
Seattle Times


[A] funny, philosophical novel…. Oddball characters and plot turns abound, including talking squirrels and bureaucratic ironies worthy of Catch-22. But a sober question occupies its core: Do our parents' best intentions do us harm?
Minneapolis Star Tribune


A wild ride that you will not want to miss…rambunctious and sober, hilarious and morbid, [with] strong echoes of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut….This unforgettable novel offers a heartfelt and sincere investigation into the paradoxical nature of love, familial as well as romantic.
Elizabeth Rosner, San Francisco Chronicle


A sweet, sharply written, romantic comedy about the pitfalls of approaching marriage…. McKenzie imbues her characters with such psychological acuity that they, as well as the off-kilter world they inhabit, feel fully formed and authentic…. With its inspired eccentricities and screwball plot choreography, McKenzie’s novel perceptively delves into that difficult life stage when young adults finally separate—or not—from their parents. In the end, The Portable Veblen is a novel as wise as it is squirrely.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air


A smart charmer about a brainy off-center couple who face up to their differences—and their difficult, eccentric families—only after they become engaged…. [The Portable Veblen] is ultimately a morality tale about the values by which we choose to live…McKenzie’s delightfully frisky novel touts…a world in which "underdogs and outsiders" like Thorstein Veblen, her appealing cast of oddballs and nonconformists, and even bushy-tailed rodents feel "free to be themselves."
NPR.org


Modern romance, Big Pharma, and one very intuitive squirrel collide in McKenzie’s clever, winningly surreal novel…. McKenzie has a pitch-perfect ear for a certain kind of California kookery…. It’s hard not to be charmed by Veblen’s whimsy.
Entertainment Weekly


Ambitious…. [McKenzie’s domestic scenes] accurately and funnily capture the complexities of modern families, made knotty by the work we’re encouraged to do in our individual lives. Think The Corrections meets The Wallcreeper—where the warring wants of career-centric success and familial harmony converge, tension and comedy emerge.
Huffington Post


No matter how many novels you’ve read, it’s safe to say you’ve never read a novel like The Portable Veblen. The book] brings together its disparate themes and worlds with confidence and dexterity, [making the standard well-made novel seem as timid as—well, as a squirrel.
Slate


(Starred review.) [O]ffbeat and winning.... McKenzie writes with sure-handed perception, and her skillful characterization means that despite all of Veblen’s quirks—she’s an amateur Norwegian translator with an affinity for squirrels—she’s one of the best characters of the year. McKenzie’s funny, lively, addictive novel is sure to be a standout.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) McKenzie skewers modern American culture while quoting from a panoply of voices, with Frank Zappa, Robert Reich, and, of course, Thorstein Veblen among them. The result is a wise and thoroughly engaging story in a satirical style comparable to the works of Christopher Moore and Carl Hiaasen. —Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) The reader can't help rooting [the young couple] on. McKenzie's idiosyncratic love story scampers along on a wonderfully zig-zaggy path, dashing and darting in delightfully unexpected directions as it progresses toward its satisfying end and scattering tasty literary passages like nuts along the way.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're made available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for The Portable Veblen...then take off on your own:

1. Describe Veblen Amundsen-Hovda. What do you think of her?

2. Describe Paul Vreeland. What do you think of his character? Is he sympathetic? If you didn't find him so at first, did you change your mind by the end of the novel? Or not.

3. Talk about Veblen and Paul's relationship. How are the two different from one another—consider the disparity between their values, desires and approaches to life. Why are they drawn to each another? What do you predict for the long-term?

4. Both Veblen and Paul have complicated families. Talk about the parents, and Justin, and the roles they play in this book. Do you find them funny or irritating...or what? Is there a "villain" among the bunch? Or not really.

5. At one point, when talking of Veblen and her mother, Paul tells Veblen:

Somehow I got the feeling she was jealous of you and that you try to avoid having her feel that way because it ruptures the equilibrium you're desperate to maintain for some reason. And that maybe you feel like you have to have a strange life so that you don't surpass her.

Is Paul correct in his assessment? Veblen thinks at first that he might be right, but then thinks, no, he's not. What do you think?

6. Okay...talk about the squirrels. What is Veblen attached to them? What does her relationship with the particular squirrel reveal about her? Is it part of the book's charm ...or a gag that feels drawn-out, over-the-top? Up to you.

7. The book is described as funny, even hilarious, and quirky. What do you find funny? Consider, for instance, Veblen's conversations with her mother, or the first time Paul meets Melanie and she hands him the list of all her illneses she's preapred in advance. Or dropping off the package in the park, the "errand" that Paul's parents undertake when Veblen first meets them.

8. In what way is the book more than a love story? In addition to, say, its critique of the military-pharmaceutical complex, what are some of its other concerns?

9. One of the conflicts in the book is the consideration of marriage vs. independence. How do those competing ideas play out in the book? Where do you fall on the subject?

10. In considering Veblen's eccentricity and her father's madness, McKenzie seems to be blurring the distinctions between the two. Where do you think she draws the line?

11. Consider Veblen's name and her namesake, Thorstein Veblen. Why is Veblen (the heroine) drawn to Veblen (the scholar-writer)? In what way does the latter reflect this work's thematic concerns?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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