Review of The Portable Veblen, by Elizabeth McKenzie, pub. Fourth Estate 2016

"I'm super excited about this getting married idea, But there's a lot about me you don't know."
"There'd better be," he said warmly.
"So it makes sense for the tips of icebergs to fall in love, without knowing anything about the bottom parts?"

This notion of people as icebergs, most of which are beneath the surface, is central to the novel. We come in at the point where Veblen, a typist and translator in her thirties, has just become engaged to Paul, a move she suspects may have been an error. Both she and he have huge issues with their families: indeed every parent in the book is more or less hopeless at the job. Several of them, as we gradually discover, have themselves been poorly parented and are passing their consequent hang-ups on to the next generation: in this respect the novel is reminiscent of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, though, as we shall see, it fights shy of his pessimistic conclusion.

Partly because of her sense of humour, McKenzie is excellent at writing about relationships without cloying sentiment or tiresome psychobabble. Her observation is acute and detailed:

…yet it was clear that your choice of mate would shape the rest of your life in ways you couldn't begin to know. One by one, things he didn't like would be jettisoned. First squirrels, then turkey meatballs, then corn, then - what next? Marriage could be a continuing exercise in disappearances.

Later, this same acute observation creates an almost unbearably moving scene when Paul, a medical researcher, is trying to get it through to the relatives of brain-damaged patients that the trial these patients are about to take part in, though it will improve knowledge of their condition, will not actually do anything to cure it. They have all been told this; they just don't want to believe it.

The people in the room began to talk, trading what they'd heard. As the volume rose, Paul shrank, his stomach bunched into a knot.
"People," he said. "This is how it is. People!"
Two young women with pale skin and knitted brows were whispering to each other, and one raised her hand.
"Our dad's here and we've read the papers," she said. "And we know that this trial is to test a device to be used within hours of brain injury. It's not designed to help people who have already suffered TBI, such as our dad and other members of this trial. Isn't that true?"
Paul said, "That was well put. Did everybody hear that?"
The room fell quiet, mown down. […]
A woman in a heavy, rust-coloured parka patched with duct tape raised her hand.
"We read the papers too. We understand all that. But for us it's better to try something than nothing. It's possible my husband could get some benefit out of this procedure, isn't it?"
More murmurs from the others. He heard someone say, "We thought so too."
He was bulging with anger at their wilful ignorance, stretching himself to hide it. He said, "I hope you'll all take the time to read the prospectus again and understand that in this trial we do not expect-" The faces, from every side of the room, were tense, wrung out. "We don't expect-" He felt the room closing in on him, every face trained on his. […] He couldn't breathe.
"We don't know what to expect until we've tried it," he blurted out suddenly, and the room lightened many degrees.

McKenzie also has a very good ear for dialogue, particularly between Veblen and her sharply drawn mother, for whom daughter's place is in the wrong. In fact the book is sharp, well-written, often funny and generally enjoyable, and if the pace sometimes slows a bit too much early on, it certainly picks up by the end. But I do have one reservation. It seems almost every new American novel I have read in the past few years is determined to achieve a happy ending, even if events up to that point make nothing seem less probable. This was the problem I had with Bradley Somer's Fishbowl. To be fair, this is not as extreme a case; it is clear, for instance, that if Veblen and her mother have achieved a modus vivendi, it largely depends on their being separated by the Atlantic. But other long-standing relationship issues are still sorted out and tied up in over-neat and fairly incredible bows. I don't know if this is because the American market demands upbeat endings, but this one didn't seem to me to have evolved naturally from the book.