Utopia Avenue a Stroll Through the 1960s

Utopia Avenue  (2020)

By David Mitchell

Random House, 592 pages.

★★★★

Blend Lester Bangs, Nick Hornby, Neil Gaiman, Thomas Pynchon, and (yes) David Mitchell. Flavor with Zelig, psychosurgery, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. That’s a good start for delving into David Mitchell’s new novel, Utopia Avenue. It’s a rare Mitchell offering that’s mostly straight narrative. Key word: mostly.

Utopia Avenue opens in London in 1967. It may be swinging, but it’s not the Summer of Love and Carnaby Street isn’t Haight Ashbury. But it is a place where risks are taken and new sonic explorations are considered. Enter Levon Frankland, a manager/music producer who dreams of putting together a new band. He has no interest in sugary ersatz pop bands like The Monkees. Instead, he wants one that will break genre boundaries. To that end, he brings together four unlikely musicians: Dean Moss, a hunky working-class bass player from Gravesend; Elf Holloway, a young woman from a solid middle-class background who already has a reputation as folk music goddess; Peter “Griff” Griffin, a jazz percussionist from Yorkshire; and Jasper de Zoet, a blistering lead guitarist originally from The Netherlands, who might be mentally ill.

In 1967, The Beatles ruled, The Rolling Stones were palace courtiers, and bands such as The Who, Ten Years After, and Pink Floyd were storming the ramparts. Mitchell’s novel is Zelig-like in that fictional characters interact with all manner of real-life celebrities: Francis Bacon, Syd Barrett, Michael Caine, Mama Cass, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Brian Epstein, Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Pigpen McKernan, Keith Moon, Steve Winwood, and many more. You might notice that some of the names on the list come from the infamous 27 Club–those who died before their 28^th birthdays. Fame requires sacrifices.

Mitchell does a superb job of capturing a Zeitgeist that stretches from London and the Midlands to New York’s Chelsea Hotel and Laurel Canyon. His characters also embody cultural shifts. Elf is a chanteuse who also happens to be as accomplished on keyboards as she is with an autoharp or acoustic guitar. She’s also in an on/off relationship with her former duo partner Bruce, an oink-oink Aussie sexist whose days are numbered by the early days of second wave feminism. Dean is the guy who can’t keep money or his tallywhacker in his jeans; Griff a sort of Ginger Baker type whose soul is always in jazz, though the money’s in rock n’ roll; and Jasper is on another plane altogether, or perhaps several. He’s been treated for schizophrenia, though he might be less Brian Wilson than things appear. At the height of acid rock, being stark raving mad wasn’t necessarily a career impediment, but in Mitchell novels one must keep open the possibility that demons might be real.

If you’ve read any of Mitchell’s past works, you know he recycles better than a backyard Earth Machine. Jasper is descended from a Dutch East India Company trader featured in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Levon appeared in The Bone Clocks, and journalist Luisa Rey showed up in Cloud Atlas. Nonetheless, you need not have previously read a word of David Mitchell to appreciate Utopia Avenue. You could just read it as–to borrow a phrase–a long strange trip through the 1960s. The book is divided into three sections named for Utopia Avenue’s three albums: Paradise is the Road to Paradise, The Stuff of Life, and The Third Planet. Think of an Icarus parallel with part one being preparation for flight, part two the ascent, and part three descent. By populating the book with real bands, you could do worse than go to YouTube to assemble your own accompanying playlist. Utopia Avenue is more than rock n’ roll, though. It shows the seedier sides of the music business, doesn’t shy from presenting the recklessness of the drug culture, and reminds there is nothing “instant” about bands that suddenly appear on the charts. It is also superb in probing family dynamics. In what Joni Mitchell famously labeled the “star maker machinery,” it is easy to forget that every celeb is somebody’s son, daughter, brother, sister, etc. Jasper has an especially complicated family background, which puts him at the center of skin-crawling creepiness that might keep you up at night.

Mitchell is to be congratulated for getting so much right. He makes us feel as though we are in the room at the Chelsea Hotel chatting with Cohen about madness or in Laurel Canyon listening to Frank Zappa diss the counterculture. Mitchell was, however, born in 1969, so there are places where his hits wrong notes. He overstates cooperation between some musicians who were bitter rivals and treats feminism as more developed than it was in 1967. Also, my memory is that gay people were much more closeted than they appear in the novel. In 1967, Britain had just decriminalized homosexuality, but acceptance took much longer. (It would not be legal everywhere in the United States until 2003.)

I’ve long held mixed feelings about David Mitchell novels. Because they are often weird, they encourage over-intellectualizing in the same way that Thomas Pynchon novels have done. This time, though, Mitchell soars like a Jasper de Zoet arpeggio.

Rob Weir