As with enjoying any great party, the art lies in knowing when to leave. Of course, eventually all the flower children will become boomers, the designated bad guys of our time, but that’s no concern of Utopia Avenue. Making your way through this novel feels like riding a high-end convertible down Hollywood Boulevard on the prettiest day of the year while luminaries wave to you from the sidewalks and nothing truly bad ever happens. Mitchell’s prose is suppler and richer than ever, and his ability to conjure a historical milieu he never actually experienced does not falter. Despite its flaws, Utopia Avenue is, page by page, a sheer pleasure to read. The band has a disappointing first gig, but it’s all uphill from there, up and up and up, until-poof! Utopia Avenue dematerializes in a rosy cloud, without suffering the corrosion that tarnished so many counterculture dreams. Since Utopia Avenue-rather than any individual member-is the protagonist of the novel, this makes for a strangely friction-free plot. At times, though, he seems starstruck by his own novel. Or perhaps Mitchell hopes to educate younger readers about a historical and cultural milieu he obviously adores. Perhaps life in London at that time really did resemble It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the exemplar of a goofy ’60s subgenre of movie comedy featuring scads of cameos by famous faces. The gang seemingly can’t walk into a room without encountering movie stars. all of these personal challenges and more get tied up as tidily as three-minute pop songs. fortunately Mitchell firmly corrals the novel’s supernatural elements into Jasper’s storyline, leaving the rest of the book to paint a sumptuous portrait of life in Swingin’ ’60s London. a highly schematic structure that doesn’t do the novel any favors. The overarching plot of Utopia Avenue is one long climb. Just as the members of Utopia Avenue themselves are the flip side of DeLillo’s vision of rock music and its myth-scaled heroes, Mitchell’s cross-referencing for its own sake could be the more benevolent, affirmative side of our era’s taste for conspiracy, in which everything is improbably connected and there’s a secret pattern that only the enlightened can see. Is this a great writer of unfathomably long vision making a kind of Yoknapatawpha out of the entirety of space and time, or the rendering of something like fan service? Maybe both. The sense of supernatural threat, of being pursued, for mysterious reasons, across time, as part of a conflict too large for individual lifetimes to contain: this is the novel’s reality, even as the characters (apart from Jasper) are oblivious of it. Jasper’s suffering, his visions and auditory 'hallucinations'-tragically, pathologically insubstantial to the other characters within the realistic landscape of the book-are, to the initiated reader, quite real, more real than the various historical genre trappings, such as Carnaby Street, or the Chelsea Hotel, or zombie David Bowie. What it all amounts to is that Utopia Avenue exists on two different planes. To go further would be to give too much away-not to everyone, perhaps, but certainly to readers of Mitchell’s earlier work. Not unlike Jasper himself, Utopia Avenue turns out to have been a sort of host for something else entirely. He proposes instead that nothing could be more natural, or in fact more commendable, than acting on the old and common longing to be heard above the crowd, even- perhaps particularly-at the cost of security and sanity. Mitchell does not castigate or punish Utopia Avenue for their yearning after lights and adulation: he is kinder and more wise. The book is most alive and most compelling when Mitchell slips the surly bonds of the realist premise and lands in his own extraordinary imagined worlds. At times, the frictionless quality of the prose extends to the story itself, so that it is possible to read for several pages at a time without quite feeling that events and characters have landed on the consciousness. It is enlivened by an attentive eye for the particulars. The novel’s prose is for the most part consciously easeful and frictionless: it is a supremely readable novel, if the quality of readability is taken to be one which is difficult to achieve and a relief to encounter. Mitchell is evidently enthralled by both the romance and the practicality of music. The reader is impelled from the first by a kind of rushing, gleeful energy. Mitchell is expert at excavating the seams of loss, ambition and mere chance that lie under the edifice of fame.
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