Some of the most squirmingly pleasurable time in this book is spent with Veblen’s mother, Melanie C Duffy, a comic creation worthy of Dickens (and the most horribly accurate portrait of a narcissist hypochondriac I have ever read). If this novel proves anything, it is that despair makes the best art (or, at least, entertainment) when it is undignified: when it is raw and weird and hilarious. Veblen loves Paul’s family, but finds it hard to move on from the trappings of her own. He has grown up with hippy parents and a disabled brother who refer to themselves as “the tripod” and have stifled him to such an extent that he despises the smell of marijuana and wants to surround himself with as many shiny materialist objects as possible. Paul’s vision of the future unfortunately turns out to be a leisure-class nightmare involving a slick house, yacht and rich friends.
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