When it comes to his musical idols, Memphis guitarist Joe Restivo has always admired “the grunt guys.”

“Those were my heroes. The working class guys that get up and make the doughnuts,” he says, chuckling. “That’s not very romantic, but those are the musicians, the players, I was most fascinated by.”

In his own way, the 40 year-old guitarist has become one of those grunt guys. Restivo is among the hardest-working musicians in town. Whether he’s doing supper club gigs with singer Susan Marshall, playing grown folks R&B or smooth jazz sessions and shows, or teaching kids at the Stax Music Academy summer camp, Restivo is constantly plugging away. In between all of that, he’s found time to be part of several of the city’s most respected roots outfits: boogaloo band the City Champs, R&B crew the Bo-Keys, soul-jazz combo Detective Bureau, and now, the Joe Restivo 4.

“Love can make people do terrible things.” Welcome to Spencerville, Virginia, 1977. Eight-year-old Rocky worships his older brother, Paul. Sixteen and full of rebel cool, Paul spends his days cruising in his Chevy Nova blasting Neil Young, cigarette dangling from his lips, arm slung around his beautiful, troubled girlfriend. Paul is happy to have his younger brother as his sidekick. Then one day, in an act of vengeance against their father, Paul picks up Rocky from school and nearly abandons him in the woods. Afterward, Paul disappears. Seven years later, Rocky is a teenager himself. He hasn t forgotten being abandoned by his boyhood hero, but he’s getting over it, with the help of the wealthy neighbors daughter, ten years his senior, who has taken him as her lover. Unbeknownst to both of them, their affair will set in motion a course of events that rains catastrophe on both their families. After a mysterious double murder brings terror and suspicion to their small town, Rocky and his family must reckon with the past and find out how much forgiveness their hearts can hold.

Hear an interview and reading by Ed Tarkington, author of Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Live literature.  Hear Mississippi on the radio.

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 fiance 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 tete-a-tete 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.

Hear and interview and reading by Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen.  Live literature.  Hear Mississippi on the radio.