The Portable Veblen

Elizabeth McKenzie

4th Estate, £8.99

Review Nick Major

PART-WAY through this droll intellectual romance Veblen Amundsen-Hovda’s friend Albertine tells her to read Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig’s book Marriage: Dead or Alive. Like any normal human being, Veblen is having doubts about holy matrimony.

She is engaged to Paul Vreeland, a neurosurgeon. According to Albertine, Guggenbuhl-Craig thinks “marriage is a continuous inevitable confrontation that can be resolved only through death.” Veblen despairs, not because her friend lacks tact but because that is exactly the kind of relationship she already has, with her mother. In a way, this is the crux of The Portable Veblen. Does marriage provide a kind of "insurance against loneliness" or does it merely entrench our neuroses, which in turn we pass on to our children?

Veblen has been named after anti-materialist philosopher Thorsten Veblen, who lived in California, where the novel is set. She is a self-made woman, preoccupied by the ills of consumerist society and determined to make people happier. But she struggles to feel sympathy for her mother, a lifelong hypochondriac who excels at emotional blackmail. Veblen is the quintessential West Coast idealist. So it is both surprising and not that her fiance has just secured a contract with a pharmaceuticals company to work on a device that reduces traumatic brain injury in the military field. Lurking in the background of their relationship is Cloris Hutmacher, a wealthy heiress whose Washington connections secured the funding for Paul’s research. His parents – hippies of the kind found in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – seem like Veblen’s sort of people, but he yearns to leave them behind and become a successful member of the bourgeoisie.

There are not many characters in this novel who aren’t maladjusted in some way, which suggests that madness might be a natural state rather than an aberration. Veblen is the colourful maypole of the novel, around which the others dance. But even her sanity is questionable. Of the many subplots, the most bizarre is her suspicion that squirrels can understand humans. It sounds quaint, but – somehow – McKenzie pulls it off. So much so that when Veblen takes a long road trip with a captive squirrel it makes perfect sense, especially once we realise the animal provides a non-human creature on to whom she can project her anxieties.

The Portable Veblen is a long engagement party of wit and oddness. The dialogue whizzes along, and there are some terrific, madcap scenes filled with cracking one-liners. For a while, however, it seems the characters have no real depth; they are empty caricatures of a kind of fashionable nerd, but as the plot scampers forward we see a deeper, more complex side to their psychology. There is a playful wisdom at the heart of this amusing novel, which questions some of our basic assumptions about love and marriage. If it could be reduced to one pithy statement, it would be this, from Soren Kierkegaard: “Marry or don’t marry, you’ll regret it either way.”