Small Towns: Falls Village, CT

Falls Village fits anyone’s definition of a small town. It’s located in a relatively unexplored section of northwestern Connecticut, the Litchfield Hills. That’s the name given to the Connecticut extension of the western Berkshires. The latter, in Massachusetts, have such an exalted reputation that it’s hard to compete. Officially, it’s the northeast part of Connecticut that carries the moniker of the “quiet corner,” but Torrington’s population of 36,383 easily makes it the largest town in Litchfield County. That’s a metropolis compared to Falls Village, a hamlet of just 538 souls. It is indeed a quiet place.  

Falls Village is actually part of North Canaan, but if we add it to that town and Canaan Village, you collectively have just 3,315 residents. The Canaans are the first town one enters west of Sheffield, Massachusetts, and the center of the main town feels more like an ex-town. That is, it’s pretty much hollowed out of anything other than essentials and parts of it are a down-market contrast to what one encounters in New Yorker summer towns such as Great Barrington, just 19 miles distant. Canaan does have an its old railroad depot, which houses a small museum and the Great Falls Brewing Company. 

 

Falls Village is leafy, quiet, and appears more prosperous than the rest of Canaan. Because of COVID, not much was going on when we visited a few weeks ago, but there is a nice-looking craft studio on Main Street, a toymaker, a coffee shop, an old library, and other attractive homes and buildings. There’s an old rail caboose at the foot of Main that you can peek into and maybe explain to kiddos that these used to be on the ends of trains! In a normal summer, there’s also a chamber music festival. The village sports a 19^th century inn of the sort where people lounge on the verandah, if you’re inclined to nestle in. Those with a taste for more action travel 8 miles down the road to Lime Rock Speedway.

The main attraction, though, is the Housatonic River. The Housatonic is one of the more varied rivers in New England. In some places it’s just a concrete trough with a few inches of water; in others it’s scenic, swimmable, and a kayak superhighway. I wouldn’t recommend paddling in Great Falls unless you are a competition-level kayaker. The aptly named village is where one finds an impressive waterfall on the Housatonic.

In the summertime, much of the water is diverted by an upstream dam but, as you can see, it’s still a lovely spot easily accessed by a very short stroll–several hundred yards–along the Appalachian Trail. Further downstream there is a whitewater slalom course for competitive kayakers, but only when water is released from the power dam. We weren’t there to see that and suspect that the dry summer has kept the flow down. We hope to go back in the spring, as apparently the winter runoff turns the river into a five-story torrent that fills the mostly dry gorge.  

I’m not sure I’d want to stay in Falls Village, but it’s a nice side trip. Plus, the minute you cross the border into Massachusetts, things get busier. There is a nice-looking café in the village called the Toymakers Cafe, though it was closed by the middle of the day, so I can’t comment on the roast. The menu looked good, though. The next time you find yourself in the Great Barrington/Sheffield area, check out Falls Village.

Rob Weir

This tranquil section of the Housatonic River is about 10 miles upstream in Sheffield, MA

The City We Became a Big Disappointment

The City We Became (2020)

By N. K. Jemisin

Hachette Book Group, 488 pages.

★ ★

The City We Became isn’t the worst book I’ve read in 2020, but it’s the most disappointing. N. K. Jemisin is a Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer and I had heard great things about her new novel. Alas, The City We Became is a great concept in search of more exposition.

The premise is that great cities like New York need human avatars to awaken them. Jemisin’s universe is the multiverse. Some scientific postulates hold forth the possibility that parallel universes with alternate histories exist alongside our own. Of course, until somebody or something breaks a barrier between our world and an alt.Earth, one can neither prove nor disprove such a hypothesis. In Jemisin’s novel, such a breach occurs.

From the outset Jemisin’s novel drifts onto turf that is more the stuff of comic books and graphic novels than hard science or, indeed, a lot of science fiction. Her New York City seems familiar but not quite, which begs the question of whether the city under siege is itself in a parallel universe. A bit of help might have made what follows more intelligible.

The novel opens with a young multiracial man arriving to New York City for the first time, his intention being to enter Columbia. The moment he gets off the train at Penn Station, he collapses and cannot remember his name. Intuitively, he makes his way across a city under stress; something has just destroyed the Williamsburg Bridge. He jumps into a Checker Cab, that’s actually a special events prop, but its driver, Madison, and “Manny,” as the visitor calls himself, are among the few that can see feathery tendrils rising through the concrete. Manny has to fend them off twice before his calling comes into sharper focus.

Manny learns from a man named São Paulo and claiming to be that city’s avatar, that New York is under assault by The Enemy and that he is the avatar of Manhattan. He must find the avatars of the other four boroughs and collectively awaken New York’s prime avatar, who lies in a deep supernatural coma somewhere in New York. Ok, what is this, some kind of J.R. R. Tolkien “one ring to rule them all” scenario? Each avatar must come to realization that they must give up the notion that a normal life is possible; in fact, their human existence might need to be sacrificed.

Jemisin assembles an interesting group. Brooklyn Thomason, who is black, is former rapper queen MC Free, but now a city councilwoman with a 14-year-old daughter and a disabled father. Dr. Bronca Sidnavoy, a Native American art gallery director, is the Bronx. Her colleagues–including an Asian and a Jewish woman–call her “Old B” because she’s almost 70, but like her borough is full of fight and attitude. Her colleague Veneza, who is Portuguese and African American, is another non-avatar who can see The Enemy. Queens is Padmini Prakash, a Tamil immigrant graduate student math geek, who is pretty much Bronca’s opposite–a shy woman who acts only when absolutely necessary. The holdout is Aislyn Houlihan–Aislyn is sometimes pronounced to rhyme with island–whom The Enemy courts in the guise of a woman in white, when she can hold onto the form. Score another borrowed concept; think Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Aislyn is a 30-year-old Irish American daddy’s girl so full of neuroses that she has never visited Manhattan and often parrots of her cop father’s bigotry.

So, we have five good avatars, including the prime. Three are queer (prime, Manny, Bronca), one is Native, one is Tamil, two are black, and one multiracial. Manny’s intended roommate is transgender and the other two city avatars that appear are non-white. None of Bronca’s work staff is WASP. Jesmin overplays her hand. A racist art collective that threatens Bronca and Brooklyn displays as white, as is “Dr. White,” the same Enemy that befriends Staten Aislyn. Maybe just a little heavy-handed n’est pas? Even without mentioning a white neo-Nazi, there is a sense of Jesmin trying way too hard to tick PC boxes and demonize straight whites. Staten Island is indeed 75% white, but Jesmin conveniently overlooks the fact that half of Brooklynites identify as white and the largest group in Queens claims to be white.* Still another bit of logic-stretching is that two of the five boroughs are represented by those who don’t really know the city, including Manhattan (which is 65% white). I like that Jesmin confronts us with the demographic reality that New York’s soul is marked by diversity; I am not, however, a fan of racial demonization of any sort.

The Enemy, we learn, is actually R’lyeh, from an H. P. Lovecraft short story. It is made manifest as viral tendrils that clandestinely infect New York, but we’re not talking COVID-19. The City We Became moves toward a beat-the-clock conclusion that is, depending on your perspective, either cool or a Williamsburg Bridge too far. Should one need to know a Lovecraft short story to “get” The Enemy? For the record, R’lyeh is the prison of the multi-tendrilled Cthulhu; both he and R’lyeh residents are generally depicted as green. Jesmin’s novel put me in mind of those graphic novels that are mostly artwork and assume readers are familiar with background details. Brush up on your Lovecraft, or you will find Jesmin’s characters all dressed up with no place to go. I wanted to care about this novel more than I did.

Rob Weir

* Race in America is complicated by the fact that more than half of Latinos, the nation’s largest “racial’ minority, identify as white.

The Aftermath is Uneven, but Better than Advertised

The Aftermath (2019)

Directed by James Kent

Fox Searchlight Pictures, 108 minutes, R (brief nudity)

★★★

The Aftermath, a British post-World War II romantic drama, is based on the namesake novel by Rhidian Brook. The title holds a double meaning. First, it is set in the firebombed ruins of Hamburg, Germany, immediately after the war; second, it also deals with the emotional aftershock of personal loss.

Colonel Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke) arrives in the British sector at a time in which thousands of Hamburg residents are homeless and combing through rubble looking for loved ones, food, and possessions. The city is also a hotbed of Werwolf activity, it being the Nazis’ answer to the underground–a movement formed in late 1944 to foment resistance to occupiers via assassination and terror.

Morgan is ensconced in digs he’d never come close to in Ye Olde England. The sleek and well-appointed estate of modernist architect Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård) has been seized for Clarke’s use as a headquarters. Morgan sends for his wife Rachel (Keira Knightley) to join him and things sour from the start. She does not understand why he’d bring her to a city of death and destruction, hates Germans, and is contemptuous of Lubert and his oh-so-utterly-unlike-England house. She wants Lubert, his teenaged daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann), and their housekeeper sent to the relocation camps.

Morgan, though, is an idealist who wants to help Germany rebuild. He tries to befriend locals and has bonded with Lubert, whose wife was killed in the bombing of the city. Morgan understands (though he hasn’t come to grips with) loss, as his and Rachel’s son Michael was killed during the Blitz of London. He’d like to allow the family to stay, as there is plenty of room and Lubert is amenable to staying in the attic. Try telling that to a 14-year-old who viscerally dislikes the English as much as most of them hate Germans. Increasingly she skips school to help dig out the city and falls under the sway of Albert, a young Werwolf firebrand. Other English officers and friends warn Morgan that he is naïve and that sentiment grows as Werwolf killings increase. He is determined, though, to apply the velvet glove rather than an iron fist.

Perhaps Morgan should have been warned against leaving his wife at home with a stud like Alexander Skarsgård! Rachel’s attitudes shift and a dangerous liaison develops. The Aftermath shifts from Hamburg to reconciling passion, reason, and grief. It’s a good story that’s competently told, though one usually expects more than just competence in a film and this one is no exception. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the movie, yet it feels flat and over-mannered. It is difficult to present emotionally gutted characters in a convincing manner–especially when it’s so obvious that libidos aren’t even in the same book, let alone on the same page, as their brains. Perhaps the novel developed these themes better, but Rachel’s turnabout is too sudden and Lubert’s icy distancing melts like some one fired up a blowtorch. One also wonders why desperate Hamburg residents hadn’t confiscated parts of his estate.

Oddly, the characters who remain emotionally shut down the longest are the most convincing. Thiemann strikes a fine balance between defiance and vulnerability–just as one expects from someone in their early teens. Clarke, who looks like a bit like a young Colm Meany in this film, also stays in character until it makes sense to shift. His demeanor of hard work and dedication is compensatory, but it makes sense. I suspect that director James Kent and the screenplay of James Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse are more to blame for gaps in the performances of Skårsgard and Knightley, though I always find myself thinking two things in Keira Knightley films: (a) She’s a poor man’s Natalie Portman, and (b) she should be tied to a table and force-fed a sandwich.

Critics savaged The Aftermath, though I give it a qualified thumb’s up. It brings to life grainy black and white photos of Germany in the days in which the war is over, but smoke still rises from the ruins and peace remains fragile. Its foreshortened look at wartime loss notwithstanding, it also gives us a glance at how individuals clear out the wreckage of personal trauma. It’s often the case that those blocks are harder to move than the walls and foundations of ruined buildings. The Aftermath could have been a better film than it was, but its faults don’t warrant its critical beat-down.

Rob Weir

Marriage Story: Overlooked

Marriage Story (2019)

Directed and written by Noah Baumbach

Netflix, 137 minutes, R (for no good reason!)

★★★ ½

Marriage Story is moving, sharply written, and well-acted by its principals: Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver. If only the secondary cast had been up to snuff, this film would have made waves instead of a puddle.

The title is Marriage Story, but it’s really about divorce. That’s a topic director and writer Noah Baumbach has explored previously in The Squid and the Whale (2005), which was based in part on his parents’ divorce, and the current film echoes his own from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh (who gave the script a thumb’s up). We come in on what looks to be a lovefest, with Nicole (Johannson) and Charlie Barber (Driver) scribbling all the things they love and admire about the other. Except, it’s for a mediator.

The impending divorce is Nicole’s idea and (on the surface) it boils down to a single factor: New York or LA? Charlie is a hot theatre director in New York City. He has featured Nicole in his plays for over a decade, which resurrected her career. Outside of New York, most people remember her for a teenager role in which she bared her breasts in a trashy Porky’s-like movie. That was then, but when Nicole is offered a TV role, she yearns to be independent, leave New York, and move to Los Angeles, where her mother and sister live. Charlie’s work is in New York, though, and he has a Woody Allen-like devotion to the city. The two initially agree to part ways without lawyers, but the complicator is their adorable young son Henry. As you can imagine, this is a deal-breaker.

Even though Charlie loves Nicole’s mom and sister at least as much as she does, he is not an LA kind of guy. He flies west to see Henry, Nicole, and her family only to learn that Nicole has hired high-powered divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern). He too needs to lawyer-up, or he might lose everything, including all custodial rights over Henry. (Forget the fact that he has stronger parenting skills than Nicole!) The proverbial fur flies and issues lingering below the surface emerge. Of course, the fastest route to losing a lot of things, including huge amounts of money, is to entrust the future to lawyers who tell you to fight or you’ll lose everything.

Johannson and Driver are superb, as you might expect of two of the finest actors of their generation. Johannson is, at one moment, a bribing mommy and the next, an ambitious ice queen. In a nice role reversal, Driver is the more vulnerable partner who cries easily, though he too can be driven over the edge. In short, what we have is an awkward divorce in which neither Nicole nor Charlie can be genuine, as they are cast into roles they must play before an avoidable tragedy burns itself out.  Baumbach’s dialogue is tight and shifts when needs be from tender to acidic. It’s mostly believable, though it must be said that New York theatre comes across as far weightier and “important” than Hollywood. It’s intellectual discussions and mixed drinks in dark-paneled bars versus poseurs and cocaine in the sunshine. Even the music is different: Sondheim versus a family cabaret.

Alas, misfired direction on Baumbach’s part mars the film. I’m a Laura Dern fan, but she’s pretty bad in this movie. She plays a high-priced divorce lawyer like a touchy-feely therapist with sharks’ teeth. We first see her in her office wearing a pair of Louboutin red heels, which she kicks off to climb onto a leather sofa to hug Nicole. This, mind you, during her initial consultation. This is unethical behavior; imagine the uproar if this had a been a male lawyer! Dern overacts throughout the film and when she goes up against Jay Martin (Ray Liotta) her performance wilts in comparison to Liotta’s surgical approach.

Nicole’s mother Sandra is played by Julie Hagerty, and Merritt Wever is sister Cassie.  Both are dreadful. Sandra is allegedly a former TV star, though she seems more like an Earth Mother from the food coop who happens to be living in a fancy home. Wever is a neurotic bundle of nerves for most of her screen time. Wallace Shawn makes a cameo as part of Charlie’s theatre company and he too is often over the top. On a sadder note, Alan Alda plays Bert Spitz, Charlie’s first lawyer. His Parkinson’s is very much on display, even to the point where he grabs his shaking right arm and pulls it down from the camera angle.

Still, the script, Johannson, and Driver are reasons aplenty to see Marriage Story. Inexplicably, though critics generally loved this film, it did nothing at the box office and returned less than 20 percent of its $18 million production costs. The film, like Charlie and Nicole, deserved a better fate.

Rob Weir

Windsor, VT: Small Towns

Old towns have tales to tell. In New England, that’s just about all of them. Welcome to Windsor, “the Birthplace of Vermont.”

That’s the title Windsor obtained in 1777, when Vermont’s Constitution was drawn up in a graceful white clapboard building that’s now a museum called, naturally enough, Constitution House. By the way, that document forbade slavery in Vermont, which set itself up as an independent republic until 1791, when it became the 14^th state–on the condition that slavery would not be the price of admission.

Then came the early 19^th century, when Windsor became an industrial village where leather harnesses, guns, and furniture were produced. Robbins and Lawrence made machine parts and some say their factory is where interchangeable parts were first made. Try having an Industrial Revolution without them! That factory closed in 1866 and it was an armory for the next hundred years until it was converted to the American Precision Museum, a sturdy red brick building that showcases the age of water power where Mill Brook tumbles over a small dam and makes its way downhill to empty into the Connecticut River. Inside the museum there’s enough info on engineering and tools to warm a gear geek’s heart.

In the 20^th century, Cone Machine Company and Goodyear were the largest employers. Both have closed and, like postindustrial towns everywhere, took a big chunk of the population with them. In 1960, there were 4,468 people in town; today there are just 3,553 and it would be fewer still were it not well-situated. Vermonters would be loath to admit it, but being on the border with New Hampshire has something to with that. Windsor is the gateway to the section of Cornish, NH that was once a thriving artists’ colony.

One of them, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, left behind studios and a home that is now a national historical park. If the name doesn’t ring immediate bells, Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) was one of the most famous sculptors of his day. Among his works are The Puritan, Abraham Lincoln: The Man, and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial that stands on Boston’s Beacon Hill. There’s hardly a major city that doesn’t have one of his works–mostly of those you don’t want to topple. At the park, you can see various pieces, studies, and casts. It’s also a very pleasant place to stroll through well-kept gardens and hike.

Crossing the Connecticut River is one of Windsor’s big attractions, and that’s no joke. One does so via the Windsor-Cornish Bridge, a 449 ½ foot long lattice truss covered bridge. It was the world’s longest covered bridge until 2008, when a faux steel and wood structure was built in Ohio. It’s a thrill to bore into a wooden tunnel that often requires headlights to penetrate the darkness. Some folks drive across several times and almost everyone stops on the New Hampshire side to snap a few photos.

Back in Windsor, a saunter down the main street reveals some of its postindustrial wreckage. It’s higher in elevation and affords a look at old factories and rundown properties. This is not a part of Vermont synonymous with rustic charm. Think abandoned or barely repurposed factories and homes that display the attendant poverty associated with job flight. It’s not a nice side stroll, but it does explain why Windsor’s town center is a mishmash–factory housing reborn as apartments, once-grand but still-handsome homes set back from the road, housing stock of varied quality, churches, and a quirky business district. You’ll find a greasy spoon diner, a striped pole barber shop, an insurance company, a credit union, antique stores, and some open-whenever stores. But you’ll also see an arts center and a firehouse whose upstairs morphs from one thing to another. It used to be a place where you could see Maxfield Parrish chromos, but that’s gone now, as Parrish’s studio in Cornish is no longer open to the public. I won’t lie; Windsor is trying but it has a way to go. I often wonder if locals appreciate the ironic name of its sleek new(ish) coffee shop: Boston Dreams.

Here’s the thing, though. Unless you pack a picnic, you’ll spend time in Windsor if you want to eat. Boston Dreams does nice breakfasts and lunches. There’s also an eatery and bar in the town’s Amtrak station, which is unique these days in that part of the railroad station is actually a station! There are pizza shops in town and a few restaurants I’ve not tried. Most visitors head a little further up the road.

Windsor is also where one accesses the road to Mount Ascutney (3,144’) where there’s a nice overview, hang gliding, and skiing on the northwest side of the mountain. It’s south of town, but if you drive north of the center you can sample distilled spirits at SILO or make your way to the Harpoon Brewery. I confess that Harpoon isn’t my bière de choix, but lots of folks like it and there’s very good pub grub to be grabbed. If you want to spend some silly money, Simon Pearce has a glassblowing and retail studio nearby.  Also close by is an unlikely pairing, an outdoor center where you can rent a kayak or canoe to paddle the Connecticut, or you might want to stay land-bound to Path of Life Garden. Cross some 60s hippies, New Age mystics, Eastern religion, and quirky artists and this is what you get. You walk counter-clockwise through sculptures, environmental art, enigmatic carvings and installations and make a symbolic journey from life and death to rebirth. If this sounds too funky, chill; it’s actually a magical one-of-a-kind place. Plus, there’s a high-hedge maze where you, your kids, and everyone in your party can get lost. I think of the Path of Life Garden as a metaphor for Windsor and towns like it.  
visit the

Rob Weir

August 2020 Artist of the Month: Two Bird Stone

Two Bird Stone

Hands and Knees (September 2020)

There are a lot of great bluegrass bands these days. Perhaps too many, as after a while they begin to step on each other’s phonic turf. North Carolina/Nashville-based Two Bird Stone is different in that it often sounds like a Celtic band that strayed a bit far from home. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the band’s moniker–as in killing two birds (bluegrass and Celtic) with a single projectile. The Irish-tinged country rocker “Shoebox Money” certainly crosses a few borders.Two Bird Stone isn't the first band to use this formula, but they do it very well.

Two Bird Stone brings together four guys who have done a lot of stuff for other people, including documentaries, movies, commercials, and touring in other people’s groups: Liam Thomas Bailey (lead vocals, banjo, fiddle, guitars, piano), Chad Kelly (accordion), Judd Fuller (bass, mandolin), and Rohin Khemani (percussion). Their debut album was prefaced by the release of the single and video of “The 99,” which also has a touch of pump organ. Is it a riff on the Biblical parable of the lost sheep, or does its imploring come and find me lyric mean something else? Listen and make up your own mind. I like to see it as the companion piece to “Handsand Knees,” a reverse road song about coming home.

A lot of the band’s material falls into the love song category. Another single, “When Somebody Can See Your Soul,” is a nice corrective to the love at first sight cliché. The lyric you can feel it…/when it’s someone that you think you should know…/when somebody can see your soul reminds us that this kind of attraction is Platonic as well as physical. Sarah Siskind guests throughout the record and is a terrific counterpoint to Bailey’s vocals–a balancing sweetness to his strong, reedy voice. She shines again on “Drive It ‘Till the Wheels Come Off.” This one builds to a soaring harmony and Siskind punches her way through the mix. For the record–pun intended–this song isn’t about handing over a jalopy; the keys go to the heart. “Needle and Thread” is another nice relationship song; it pays homage to the one who stitches things together so that everything makes sense.

I found the band’s Celtic fiddle and accordion melody lines refreshing. That’s not just because of my love of Celtic music. As accomplished as many young bluegrass players are these days, too many bands have fallen into predictable patterns of short establishment of a melody line, vocal, alternating instrumental solos. That was the norm of the early days of bluegrass, but the crossover “newgrass” emerging from the 1980s disrupted the old Bill Monroe paradigm. I’m certainly not knocking Monroe or what is oxymoronically called “traditional” bluegrass–it’s problematic to use the term traditional for any music whose exact origins we know–but bluegrass strikes me as a musical form in which retro should be used sparingly. After all, Monroe, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Norman Blake and other such classic stars are mighty big shoes to slip on. By sliding into Celtic melodies, Two Bird Stone again uses a single rock to accomplish two useful things: their melody lines sway and linger, and Celtic music has already been thoroughly hybridized.

I have a reservation, though. I’ve not seen this band live and I worry that it’s so much Bailey’s band that it might be hard to capture the studio magic on the stage. Bailey sings leads, but he’s also the string lead on backing tunes. Some of the tracks, for instance, overlay banjo and fiddle–both of which Bailey plays. The album also uses Kenny Vaughan on guitar and that’s another stringed instrument Bailey plays. Unless he’s amazing at laying down melodies and using pedal playback, much of what we hear on the album would need to be altered for the stage. And, of course, Sarah Siskind has her own career.

A final caution: There seems to be another band called Two Bird Stone that plays funk, so if you go video surfing make sure you get the right band!

Rob Weir

 See also this new video of "If You Want to Come Back," which is on the album.

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