The Portable Veblen

From acclaimed New Yorker and Atlantic contributor Elizabeth McKenzie comes a heartwarming, exuberant novel about true love, the medical-military complex, Norwegian American economist Thorstein Veblen, and the inner lives of squirrels

Office temp Veblen Amundsen-Hovda and neurologist Paul Vreeland meet cute when she interrupts him testing bone saws, deep into his research for the treatment of battlefield brain trauma. She’s an “experienced cheerer-upper and freelance self,” an amateur translator from the Norwegian who’s named after the economist Thorstein Veblen. Paul’s a doctor whose new device—still pending trials—has been snapped up by the avaricious Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals, which does big business with the Department of Defense. Paul is brilliant, kind, accomplished, and totally smitten with her. So why is she getting the jitters after he proposes?

Maybe it’s the way he wants to eliminate the squirrel that’s been coming a little too close to the house. Maybe it’s the force of nature that is Melanie, her mother, a narcissist who elevates hypochondria to an art form and can never let a single remark go uncritiqued. Maybe it’s the fear that she’s inherited the madness of her institutionalized father, a Vietnam vet who ends every story with the ominous line “They were never the same again.” Or maybe it’s Paul’s baggage, which is more copious than she imagined: hippie parents who always make excuses for Justin, his developmentally disabled brother.

As Paul is swept up by a seductive pharmaceutical scion and the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically tries to keep 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 a blast of pure power-pop prose.