I’d been vaguely meaning to read The Portable Veblen for months, but I’d also been vaguely worried I wouldn’t like it—that it would be annoyingly trying-too-hard quirky rather than pleasingly quirky. I shouldn’t have worried, but also, I think I read this book at exactly the right time. After reading two non-fiction books in a row, I was ready for a fun and engrossing novel, and on a three-day-weekend with my boyfriend away at Burning Man and me at home in Brooklyn with the threat of a tropical storm looming, I wanted something that would keep me entertained if I ended up being stuck at home in days and days of rain. Well: post-tropical storm Hermine veered east and it didn’t rain at all here this weekend, but this book was still very good company. (And it was actually kind of great to read right after Moira Weigel’s Labor of Love, which had things to say about dating and consumer culture, since that’s a point of tension in this book.)
So, right: at the start of the book, 30-year-old Veblen Amundsen-Hovda and 34-year-old Paul Vreeland get engaged, though they haven’t been dating that long. We get the story of their meeting (at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he was a neurologist doing research on traumatic brain injuries and she’s an office assistant) and bits of their shared present and their separate pasts. Veblen talks to squirrels; there’s apparently one living in her attic, which doesn’t bother her, but definitely bothers Paul, who’s kept up at night by the racket it makes and comes home one day with a humane trap for it. We learn about Veblen’s difficult mother and Paul’s mentally-disabled brother and how Paul was lured away from Stanford by the heiress of a giant pharmaceutical company who’s interested in the new device he’s invented, which promises to revolutionize the treatment of brain injuries on the battlefield. We learn about points of tension between the otherwise happy couple: Veblen wants a wedding in the woods, while Paul was thinking they could take the pharmaceutical heiress up on her offer to let them get married at her estate; he gets her a huge flashy engagement ring that is not her style at all, and she doesn’t understand his desire for things like a big new house or a boat; they don’t particularly get along with each other’s best friends. But the biggest tensions end up coming from their families and their family histories: Veblen’s difficult mother is a hypochondriac whose neediness has shaped Veblen’s personality; Paul resents his hippie parents for being very present for his disabled brother and not so present for him, and craves mainstream success/normalcy in part as a reaction to their lifestyle.
Meanwhile, there are hijinks going on related to the pharma company and the clinical trial that Paul is running with them (sidenote: the company’s founder is named Boris; his daughter is Cloris; her son is Morris: if that doesn’t make you giggle, you might not like this book), and various unexpected plot developments make Paul and Veblen each doubt whether they should get married after all. The last hundred pages or so of the book feel like a screwball comedy in a very good way, and I was alternately laughing and cringing and totally unable to put the book down. I saw a negative review on Goodreads that compared this to Where’d You Go, Bernadette—the reviewer making the comparison didn’t like that book or this one. I also felt there were similarities, but I loved them both.
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