The book:
The Portable Veblen is an absolutely wonderful book. Funny, accessible, relevant, idiosyncratic and utterly charming, we are so pleased to have it as our pick for March. We really hope you like it as much as we did.
The novel hinges on the irrepressible (and squirrel obsessing) Veblen Amundsen-Hovda: a passionate defender of the anti-consumerist views of her name-sake, the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen. She’s an experienced cheerer-upper (mainly of her narcissistic, hypochondriac, controlling mother), an amateur translator of Norwegian, and a firm believer in the distinct possibility that the plucky grey squirrel following her around can understand more than it lets on.
Through an endearingly comic plot that takes us into deeper considerations of serious matters such as capitalism, the medical industry, family, love, war and wedding-planning, The Portable Veblen delivers a experience that is a rare find indeed.
What the Guardian thought:
“Art is despair with dignity,” declares the protagonist of this novel, Veblen Amundsen-Hovda, an “independent behaviourist, experienced cheerer-upper, and freelance self”. Veblen, also a long-term squirrel obsessive, was named after the economist Thorstein Veblen, best known for his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. She has been moved to make her pronouncement about art after an encounter with her hilariously narcissistic, hypochondriac mother. “As she drove away, eyes still red, she vowed that the only way to break free from the grief her mother caused her was to make something of it – but what?”
This question is not quite answered within the novel. Instead, Veblen accepts a marriage proposal from her neurologist boyfriend Paul, wears the gaudy diamond ring he gives her and tries not to get too involved with a squirrel who seems to want her to think differently about her life.
Paul’s vision of the future unfortunately turns out to be a leisure-class nightmare involving a slick house, yacht and rich friends. He has grown up with hippy parents and a disabled brother who refer to themselves as “the tripod” and have stifled him to such an extent that he despises the smell of marijuana and wants to surround himself with as many shiny materialist objects as possible. Veblen loves Paul’s family, but finds it hard to move on from the trappings of her own.
If this novel proves anything, it is that despair makes the best art (or, at least, entertainment) when it is undignified: when it is raw and weird and hilarious. Some of the most squirmingly pleasurable time in this book is spent with Veblen’s mother, Melanie C Duffy, a comic creation worthy of Dickens. When Paul asks Melanie about her migraines, he stumbles into a limitless catalogue of symptoms and allergies.
“Where are all the heroes?” asked Sylvester Stallone in 1976, following his performance in the Oscar-winning film Rocky. “Right now it’s as if a big cavernous black hole has been burned into the entertainment section of the brain. It’s filled with demons and paranoia and fear.” This black hole unfortunately persists, particularly in a certain type of literary fiction in which self-centred characters suffer endlessly through family scenes that can read like so many psychotherapeutic outtakes. At times this novel approaches the edge of this black hole, but it never gets sucked in, in part because Melanie is so hilarious, and also because Paul is such an honestly drawn character – the closest thing the book has to a hero.
Good old Paul. Both the most likable and unlikable character in this novel, he functions as its engine and its heart. Were it not for his horrible mistakes, nothing in the other characters’ lives would ever change. Should he leave his comfortable role at Stanford to try to make a name for himself leading a shady clinical trial bankrolled by a psychotic pharmaceutical heiress? Of course not. But Paul wants his yacht and so drama happens. And very entertaining it is, too.
Scarlett Thomas - Read the full review
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