The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie

What better way to avoid the mess your life has become than by trying to clean up everyone else's messy life? Penny is in her mid-30s with a broken marriage and without anywhere to live. She's unemployed and her small amount of savings is swiftly dwindling. However, her irascible hoarder grandmother Dr Pincer is in an even more perilous situation. Adult Protective Services have warned that they'll step in if something isn't done about her filthy house and the possible weapon she uses to threaten strangers. As Penny journeys to help she becomes embroiled in other people's troubles including Dr Pincer's sickly accountant, her bullying biological father and her grandfather Arlo whose second wife can't stand to live with him any longer. Added to that is the fact that Penny's mother and stepfather disappeared in the Australian Outback five years ago and she can't accept that they're really gone.

We follow her journey stumbling through misadventures and desperate situations. She gets caught in hijinks such as washing a sticky toupee in an office bathroom, looking after a cute Pomeranian dog and retrieving her lost phone from the sinkhole her vehicle collapsed into. Her good intentions often only lead her into more trouble. In witnessing these eccentric characters and outlandish dilemmas through Penny's eyes we gradually become aware of just how little her own emotional and physical needs are being attended to. I appreciate the way Elizabeth McKenzie approaches the complexity of family entanglements with absurdist humour as demonstrated in her novel “The Portable Veblen”.

It was a pleasure reading this wacky story as it zips through farcical encounters and veers around unpredictable corners. Being so steeped in Penny's consciousness and questionable logic it's easy to forget just how perilous her own situation is becoming until she's practically broken and destitute. Equally her self-effacing and eager to please manner mean her voice is almost drowned out by the strong-willed and colourful personalities that surround her. I found it moving how towards the end of the book we get a deeper understanding of her own deprivations. Though the idiosyncratic figures and madcap circumstances come perilously close to outright silliness, there's a warm heart to this story which makes it ultimately endearing.

The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

In the past several months I've been thinking a lot about how my parents have influenced who I am. It's only become evident after some time and distance while making my own life in adulthood how patterns of behaviour can be seen in relation to how I was raised and how I reacted to them. I don't want to ascribe blame for any of my shortcomings on my parents' actions. It's simply interesting to observe and try to understand how the alchemy of nature and nurture influence attitudes and values throughout life. This novel acutely observes how “A life could be spent like an apology – to prove you had been worth it.” I believe that if we don't frequently reflect on the way our families have made us who we are the self becomes wayward, acting out in reaction to the past rather than working to better realize who we are in the present.

“The Portable Veblen” is about a couple who meet and marry, but it's much more a story about families and how two people can forge lives of their own coming out of very difficult family situations. Veblen is a thirty year old woman who lives on the remote edges of Palo Alto working secretarial temp jobs to fund her passion for translating Norwegian literature and studying her namesake Thorstein Bunde Veblen, a Norwegian-American economist. She freely quotes William James and sees herself as a curious kind of “travelling scribe” recording the lives of those around her. She meets and quickly falls in love with Paul Vreeland, a thirty-five year old research scientist who is on the brink of discovering a revolutionary new method for relieving cranial swelling and brain damage from head trauma. They want to marry soon, but planning a wedding isn't simple with families like these.

Veblen's mother Melanie is a hypochondriac who seems to have a new chronic medical condition every day and has a fierce emotional attachment to her daughter. Melanie's husband Linus, Veblen's step-father, tiptoes around his wife trying not to upset her and caters to her frequent unreasonable whims. Veblen's father Rudgear has been living for years in a mental institution as he suffers from PTSD and barely recognizes his daughter on her infrequent visits. Because Veblen has needed to take on a caring role for both her parents she still clings to childish fantastical notions of fictional lands filled with animals. It means she talks to squirrels.

Paul was raised under very different circumstances where his anti-establishment parents lived in a type of commune that grows marijuana. When they aren't engaged in sessions of chemically-induced escapism, most of their care and attention goes to Paul's mentally disabled brother. This upbringing has in turn made Paul very independently-minded and ambitious to gain approval from the establishment. However, his aspirations to achieve recognition in medical technology and bring his device to fruition entangle him in a corrupt system that his parents were rightly suspicious of. Alongside the story of his evolving relationship with Veblen is a plot about a corrupt medical industry that values profit over people's health care.

Thorstein Bunde Veblen

There are many cringe-worthy tragicomic scenes in this book as the couple meet each other's families and try to navigate how they can successfully integrate them into the life they want to build together. Importantly, the author doesn't mock the parents in this book or make them targets of derision for the ways they may or may not have fucked up their children. McKenzie takes care to show how they are capable of catering to their children's wellbeing when it's really needed. There is a tenderness of feeling present amidst the chaos as Veblen declares at one point “But you love your family, what can you do.”

It's interesting how McKenzie can introduce surprising moments of self-reflection amidst her narrative. As the characters' lives teeter on the brink of losing all control she can suddenly stop and ask searching questions which probe how the past and family life might influence the way her characters relate to their partners: “Was it possible to love the contradictions in somebody? Was it all but impossible to find somebody without them? Had her mother made of her a ragged-edged shard without a fit?” There is an endearing feeling throughout this novel of desperately trying to make sense of one's life while facing the challenges of life and trying to forge honest meaningful relationships.

McKenzie also has a fascinating absurd slant on the world. The squirrel Veblen maintains an occasional dialogue with becomes an important character himself and bends the plot of the story. Interspersed with the text of the story are occasional photos depicting a variety of things that Veblen either sees or imagines which make the reader more immersed in her view of the world. There’s an intriguing urgency to this author’s narrative which is more concerned with what her characters are thinking and feeling moment to moment rather than creating an organized structure to their journey or finding a clear consistent focus. She allows for moments of pause such as this: “She relaxed and watched a family at a table nearby, the parents feeding the children, wiping their mouths, cleaning their hands, a father and mother and two children, the unit of them unsettling to her, though she couldn’t say why. She looked away, at an older man eating by himself, and that unsettled her too. She wasn’t sure how to live.” Rather than developing her characters, McKenzie allows them to wade in uncertainty in a way which is strikingly poignant and meaningfully blunt.

“The Portable Veblen” is a curious book in that it isn’t afraid to keep asking questions for which there can be no solutions. I felt really connected to the story because of that and enjoyed the humorous and relevant journey of psychological insight it took me on.