Speaking of fissures, Jasper represents the most cracked band member, and the one with the most potential for upending their forward progress. It takes until page 384 for someone to have sex with someone who might shake the band’s foundation.

Never do any of these things threaten the band in any compelling way.

Yes, Dean sleeps around and goes to jail. Mitchell needs to exploit these fissures to render compellingly the conflicts of a rock band, but he largely misses his chances. Each is from their own corner of the world, and the differences between them are ready places for cracks to form in the band’s facade. None of the musicians in Utopia Avenue emerge from a vacuum. Any band in London would want him ….Griff has the jazz circuit. “I need the others more than they need me, thinks Dean. While the band members of Utopia Avenue-bassist Dean, drummer Griff, guitarist Jasper, and pianist Elf-all are talented folks who seek success, Mitchell renders their disparate circumstances to portend that all sailing will not be smooth for the foursome. Mitchell’s story recounts the ascension of the eponymous band, which forms in 1967 when London-based manager Levon brings together four talented musicians of somewhat disparate styles to create a rock group to top the charts. With Utopia Avenue, Mitchell contributes a compelling if too-comfortable effort that boasts artful craftsmanship but lacks the inter-band electricity to make a rock novel soar. The release of a new novel by such as esteemed writer is rightfully treated as a major literary event, and that the title is also a rock novel makes it a major literary event to me, since I write and review rock novels. This level of attention to narrative is as one might expect from the author of the international bestseller Cloud Atlas. Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell feels like fine masonry, the British brick-and-mortar stuff from Dickens to Rowling that evokes the lived-in, comfortable, secure.

Mitchell utopia avenue