THE PORTABLE VEBLEN: A NOVEL
Book ID/图书代码： 02330014B76442
English Summary/英文概要： 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 that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. 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.
As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps 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 an electrifying reading experience.
McKenzie’s idiosyncratic love story scampers along on a wonderfully zig-zaggy path, dashing and darting in delightfully unexpected directions as it progresses toward its satisfying end and scattering tasty literary passages like nuts along the way.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 这是一部《纽约客》撰稿人写作的有关爱与家庭，战争与自然，新贵与传统价值观的华丽而特别的原创小说。小说风格洒脱、语言幽默。故事背景设定在帕罗奥多新贵和传统价值观的文化冲突之中，审视了当前人们的生活方式，令读者难忘。
小说讲述了一对处于婚姻破裂边缘的年轻夫妻的故事。迷人的凡勃仑和她的未婚夫，神经学家的未婚夫妻关系岌岌可危。一路上，他们经受了各种考验，包括双方不正常的家庭，一位诱惑性的制药业女继承人，与一只可爱松鼠的亲密接触。
凡勃仑（这个名字取自经济学家托斯丹•凡勃仑，他创造了“炫耀性消费”这个术语）可以说是近年来最新鲜有趣的小说女主人公之一。尚未挣脱父母枷锁的凡勃仑自称是一名业余翻译家，其实是个无业游民。而出身自嬉皮士家庭的保罗的事业正如日中天。他的医疗研究帮助开发了一种减轻战争脑损伤的装置，也因此将自己卷入了一场与国防部的高风险交易之中。
当保罗沉浸在名誉和金钱之中时，凡勃仑英勇地维护着他们的即将到来的婚礼，直到她发现自己爱上了某人，或者说某物。在整个故事中，作者提出了各种问题：我们的家庭何时停止，我们的自我何时开始？我们该如何忠于理想？那只松鼠到底在想些什么？（LYR）
Awards/获奖情况：• 2017 California Book Award silver medal for fiction
• A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2016
• A Top 20 Fiction Book of 2016 on thewhatlist.com
• Longlisted for 2016 National Book Award for Fiction
• Shortlisted for 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction
“……凡勃仑是今年最好的小说人物之一。这部幽默、生动、令人着迷的小说非常出众。”——《出版人周刊》（星级评论）
“这是一个发生在天堂般帕罗奥多的道德故事。作者描绘了一个前途无限的年轻神经学家受到来自医疗经济黑暗面的诱惑的故事，既深刻，有让人忍俊不禁。”——Abraham Verghese，《纽约时报》畅销书作者
“Offbeat and winning…McKenzie writes with sure-handed perception, and her skillful characterization means that despite all of Veblen’s quirks—she’s an amateur Norwegian translator with an affinity for squirrels—she’s one of the best characters of the year. McKenzie’s funny, lively, addictive novel is sure to be a standout.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A clever morality tale set against the verdant paradise of Palo Alto. McKenzie’s story of an ambitious young neurologist and the seductions of the darker side of the medical economy is both incisive and hilarious.” -Abraham Verghese, New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Ston
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/issue/best-of-2016/section/fiction/?page=7
THE PORTABLE VEBLEN by Elizabeth McKenzie has been honored with the 2017 California Book Award silver medal for fiction (second only to Michael Chabon’s MOONGLOW, which won gold).
About the Author/作者介绍： Elizabeth McKenzie，作家，著有一系列作品，包括入围The Story Prize短名单的《阻止那个女孩（Stop That Girl）》等。她的作品在《纽约客》《大西洋月刊》等多部杂志上发表。在斯坦福大学获得硕士学位，曾在《大西洋月刊》担任助理编辑，目前在斯坦福继续教育学院教授创意写作。
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, and has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was an NEA/Japan US-Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010. She received her MA from Stanford, was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic, and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford’s school of continuing studies.
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