All this is set in mid-sixties London, when and where it was possible to believe uncynically that new music could change the world. They are introduced to one another by a wise and benevolent manager (maybe the first one in the history of the rock novel) named Levon Frankland, who spots them playing in other, subpar bands and has a hunch, their disparate musical influences notwithstanding, that they would sound great together. In David Mitchell’s novel “Utopia Avenue” (Random House), four such figures-young, reasonably talented, eager to succeed-come together to form a band of that name. Why shouldn’t they get the literary treatment, too? Nor does everyone feel oppressed by celebrity all that star-maker machinery has to get stoked with something, and for every Dylanesque refusenik in the world there are ten thousand volunteers for fame. Plenty of its practitioners make decent music, and decent livings, without feeling the need to subvert or defy anything at all. “Those whose musical tastes end in the early 1970s-and literary tastes are up to the minute-will especially enjoy Mitchell’s yarn.There’s a side of rock and roll-defiant, anarchic, Dionysian, subversive, doomed, Romantic-that has always appealed to literary novelists, but that’s not its only side. This is Mitchell at his best.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Mitchell unspools at least a dozen original song lyrics and descriptions of performances that are just as fiery and infectious as his narratives. “Mitchell continues to use the rhythms of surface reality to dig much deeper, but without ever losing the beat.” - Booklist (starred review) “ Utopia Avenue’s got all the sex, drugs, and broken dreams you want in a rock novel, plus guest appearances by Jagger, Jerry, Janis, and Jim (Morrison).” - The Philadelphia Inquirer “The British pop-folk-rock band Utopia Avenue this novel focuses on seems so true to life, at least one reviewer (who shall not be named) may have Googled them just to confirm that they were a figment of the author’s imagination.” -AARP “For his first novel in five years, the author explores the universal language of music. A conventional story of a band’s rise turns into a book on another plane entirely.” - The New Yorker “Mitchell, whose novels range through different modes and genres with extraordinary facility, has a lucid, kinetic style at all times, but he is never more impressive than when writing in close third person about characters in altered mental states-captivity, physical pain, madness. We’ll get back to the garden someday.” - Los Angeles Times “In 2020, there is something utopian about the idea of people gathering together to make and record and play music, to create a scenius together. Mitchell’s obsessions–beyond the fictional meta-universe he has created–are with human voyages of self-actualization the process of figuring out who we are, and how we connect, in the brief time we have.” - Time Beneath the layers of references and unconventional structures lie lucid narratives. His sentences can be lyrical, but his prose is propulsive. His eight novels are experimental but approachable. “’s work has been compared to that of Haruki Murakami, Thomas Pynchon and Anthony Burgess. Can we really change the world, or does the world change us? Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss and guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, Utopia Avenue embarked on a meteoric journey from the seedy clubs of Soho, a TV debut on Top of the Pops, the cusp of chart success, glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel, Laurel Canyon, and San Francisco during the autumn of ’68.ĭavid Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder of the families we choose and the ones we don’t of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper of music, madness, and idealism. Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post Making your way through this novel feels like riding a high-end convertible down Hollywood Boulevard.”- Slate Mitchell’s prose is suppler and richer than ever. “Mitchell’s rich imaginative stews bubble with history and drama, and this time the flavor is a blend of Carnaby Street and Chateau Marmont.”- The Washington Post.New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice The long-awaited new novel from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.
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