The Portable Veblen

Elizabeth McKenzie, “The Portable Veblen, Penguin Press, 2016.

“Veb, did I ever tell you how I became interested in neurology?”

“Can’t say that you did,” she said stiffly. 

“Kind of painful,” Paul continued. “I was spending all my time in the library to get away from the freaks at home, and the librarian took me under her wing. Mrs. Brown. She was a stern old bag who pitied me, I think. I was all over the place. So one day she handed me the Life picture book called The Mind — up to that point I’d mostly been reading science fiction — but The Mind was even weirder.  I remember seeing this one page, ‘Isolate human.’ A Princeton student in a lightless chamber with no sound, his hands in gloves.  I think the guy went totally crazy after thirty or forty hours. [p.219]

COMMENT

This is an amusing fictional variation on the transformational book narrative, but I’m pretty sure I remember reading this actual book as a child, or at least one very much like it.[1] The joke is, the transformational book is both life-changing and self-delusional. Grownup Paul becomes a mad scientist. 
         Libraries, librarians and books occur frequently in this effervescent novel offering the characters ways to view the world and themselves (some more helpful than others). Mrs. Brown the Librarian turns up in another part of the story when young Paul is setting up a science fair experiment hoping to document the sound of screaming snails. She helps him find reference material in entirely made-up books called Invertebrates Around Us and Gastrapoda Today. When his experimental snails fail to scream young Paul, to his lasting shame, falsifies his data. Veblen, the protagonist, is named after the Norwegian-American philosopher Thorstein Veblen and she frequently channels her namesake. Her kind but self-effacing stepfather Linus, “had been an academic librarian at UC Berkeley, and a rare-book dealer.” He mentors his stepdaughter by offering her carefully selected books. As young Veblen is being sent on court-mandated visits to her insane biological father he supplies her with White Fang, Call of the Wild, and “a few other novels about ill-treated beasts.” 

[1] Wilson, John Rowan, The Mind,  Life Science Library, 1965.   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135687.The_Mind