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The Portable Veblen cover

The Portable Veblen

Elizabeth McKenzie

0

awards won

4

score

#3487 of 8,085 books · #1750 in Fiction

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction (2016).

A young couple on the brink of marriage--the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist--find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other's dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term "conspicuous consumption") is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and "freelance self"; in other words, she's adrift. Meanwhile, Paul--the product of good hippies who were bad parents--finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma--an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity.

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Publisher
Penguin Press
ISBN-13
9781594206856
Genre
Fiction
Topics
Marriage and family dysfunctionSatire of corporate and military bureaucracySelf-discovery

Awards

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