I recently finished reading Utopia Avenue, the latest by cult novelist David Mitchell (author of, among other things, Cloud Atlas). It’s longish – almost 600 pages in the hardcover and that’s not a bad thing because I enjoyed it. It is an expert historical novel about the ‘Swinging Sixties’ built around a ragtag group of young British musicians who come together and make music and, in the process, find themselves.
It’s fun from the beginning, seeing the band come together almost out of nothing. One day in 1967, Dean Moss, a bass player gets evicted from his flat and loses his job on the same day. Across town, a folk musician named ‘Elf’ has broken up from her lover and singing partner. A young music manager with a mission to create a new band from scratch finds these two and two others – drummer Peter Griffin and guitarist Jasper de Zoet to complete the quartet.
They are a motley crew. Dean Moss, the gorgeous, sex-addicted, vaguely Mick Jagger-ish bassist, has barely survived an abusive, down-at-heels childhood in Gravesend; Jasper, the binational, upper-crusty product of boarding schools, suffers from psychological problems that, at first, you’re tempted to diagnose as Asperger’s. (He has to self-consciously “act” his smiles on cue and “decipher” facial expressions, which to him are as “impenetrable as Sanskrit.”) It’s worth noting that Mitchell, who has written about his own son’s autism, avoids the term here. Elf Holloway, the band’s lone woman, culled from the folk circuit, is comfortably upper-middle-class and can’t understand why none of the guys she dates make her happy; Peter “Griff” Griffin, the gruff drummer, comes from a matey, blue-collar milieu in Hull. How they come together to play music is a mystery at the beginning.
Mitchell captures the tension between artists and their labels trying to divine the next turn of teen tastes. He re-creates the music shows in all their cringing giddiness. And the pages of “Utopia Avenue” are a veritable Who’s Who of the era — including the Who. Miraculously regenerated legends stroll through every chapter. Crazy cameos by young David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and so many others make this novel a night at the fantasy party you will never be invited to. There are in-jokes about the pop music world that will be catnip for fans: In one scene set on the roof terrace of the Chelsea Hotel, Joplin, who’s been talking to Elf about the struggles of women musicians, gets to give her own account of the act of fellatio that Cohen immortalized in his 1974 song “Chelsea Hotel #2.” They go to parties at which hip lesbians say things like: “I played ‘Wedding Presence’ so often, I wore out the track. It’s numinous, if I can use that word.”
There are a bunch of self-referential winks in the book. Mitchell fans will recognize that Jasper de Zoet has the same last name as Jacob de Zoet from one of his previous novels. De Zoet has issues and some history that, I think, distracts from the story but overall I liked the book. Mitchell does a good job of adding a sense of immediacy to the book and there’s a lot of intersection of words and feelings that move the story along. It’s an enjoyable read and a nice look back at the ‘Swinging Sixties’.
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