The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

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 set amid a California culture clash of new money and antiestablishment values. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in collapse. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. She is an amateur translator and “freelance self”—in other words, she’s adrift.

Meanwhile, Paul finds his ambition soaring. He’s developed a device to minimize battlefield brain trauma, an invention that plunges him into a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense. With Paul swept up in the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen tries to keep the peace as the wedding approaches, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else.

As Veblen and Paul face off with their families, a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, and one charismatic squirrel, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what’s that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is a bighearted inquiry into what we look for in love.

Story Locale: Palo Alto, CA

Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of a collection, Stop That Girl, short-listed for The Story Prize, and the novel MacGregor Tells the World, a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She received her MA from Stanford, was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic, and is currently an editor at the Chicago Quarterly Review and the Catamaran Literary Reader.

Author Residence: Santa Cruz, CA

9781101981597
Paperback , Trade
English
General Trade
Nov 01, 2016