Skip to main content

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen
The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash?

In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV’s main character, Veblen, is named.

For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of your identity? Do you have a responsibility to emulate the 19th century philosopher you’re named after? Those sorts of universal questions.

While McKenzie never really answers any of these questions, the exploration in itself is interesting and enjoyable. It helps that she gives Veblen a minor insanity: the belief that she can understand and be understood by squirrels. The squirrels, which sort of act as a symbol for respecting nature as a whole, add a bit of oddness to the novel and twist it into a slightly different genre, in the same way as seeing a hairless cat is totally different to seeing a regular, fuzzed-up one.

The main draw of this novel are the characters. While some are too heightened to be fully believable, for me that’s a plus, because I love that style of characterisation and it lends a lot of humour to the novel.

It sits oddly between the book about philosophy and the book about domestic dynamics. In that way, the book’s genre is a pretty apt reflection of the characters’ tensions. Imagine it was called Freud Family Values, and you’re getting someone towards it. And if that sounds fun to you, definitely give this a shot.

--

This is my ninth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 43: The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

I didn’t quite know what to expect from Shirley Jackson. I feel like she’s often put into the thriller category, but if you encountered her alongside John Grishams and P.D. Jameses, I suspect you’d consider her misplaced. Mostly, though, I only knew it from a brief mention on The Simpsons, shortly before Homer throws the book into the fireplace. I know, I know. This is what you get from Broken Britain’s education system. Imagine my delight, then, to find that The Lottery and other stories is a collection of carefully-crafted short story gems. Turns out that people enter the literary canon for a reason. Who knew? Jackson’s stories have a clear theme running through them of propriety and conformity. She tackles these from lots of different angles – judgemental mothers, anxious homeowners, murderous communities. These are all brilliantly polished, mostly viewed from the perspective she knew best – city life in 40s and 50s America. There’s a clear focus on gender here too, w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 24: The Flick by Annie Baker

My first play of my 100 Book Year is the Pulitzer prize-winning The Flick from American playwright Annie Baker. Oof, that almost sounds like the opening to Wikipedia article. But instead of rewriting it, I’m just going to reference that fact and turn this intro into solid gold through the lazy medium of apparent self-awareness. ANYWAY, it centres on three people working in a run-down little cinema in Worcester, Massachusetts. It’s the first I’ve read / seen of Annie Baker, but it’s apparently very representative of her style: lots of small, apparently mundane conversations by everyday people, that are vehicles for big overall emotional shifts. This gives a lot of space for nuance, which I like, and goofball humour, which I like even more. Imagine all the crummiest jobs a minimum-wage cinema attendant might have to deal with, condensed into a few short interactions. It could be depressing, but Baker makes it hilarious. Plays are different to novels in that novels have the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 36: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

Across the course of this challenge, I’ve tended to pick authors whom I know are well-respected, or books that have sat on my ‘to read’ list endlessly, gathering dust and weeping like abandoned children. So when I saw Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove winking at me, a book I’ve never heard of by an author I’ve never heard of, but with a frankly excellent title, I thought Are you Abba? Because I’m gonna take a chance on you. I’m delighted that I did. VITLG is a book of short stories, each of which follows a similar form: there’s a weird idea that forms the crux of the plot, and then Russell sets about making it feel fleshed out with believable characters. It would be wrong to call this surrealism, because there’s generally only a single oddity in each story. But it’s also not quite magic realism. It’s somewhere in-between. Or if it is magic realism, it’s 90% realism and 10% magic. It’s on the Murakami road. Let’s be exemplokleptomaniacs and take an example: in on...
Post a Comment
Read more