"David Mitchell’s captivating new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us?"
Intimidatingly long, this book is one I have struggled to pick up and get through.

Very cool. Kind of weird. My kind of book, honestly. Well written. Highly recommend.

-- This review is several years past the release date due to the many issues of 2020, but a huge thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an early copy of the book.

I was lucky enough to virtually attend the release party event for this book with its author, David Mitchell. It's a fun historical read about a strange British band called Utopia Avenue in the 1960s. David Mitchell's writing is so good! I would recommend this book to any reader who likes historical fiction and/or stories with music involved.

Delighted to highlighted this new release in “Rock 'n' Roll Reads,” a round-up of classic and notable books about 1970s music, pegged to the release of Daisy Jones & the Six adaptation. In the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see round-up at link)

This was a fun, meandering book that followed the story of a band in the 1960s. I love David Mitchell's writing voice!

This felt like a typical David Mitchell novel, which is not a bad thing at all. Very readable and enjoyable, not necessarily memorable, but a good way to pass the weekend.

David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue is a 1960's period piece. It had no real plot, other than the band getting together, and the things that do happen are just to inspire the songs in the book. There are a lot of cameos in the book that will make any music lover happy. Overall it just didn't find it's groove for me.

Utopia Avenue has been languishing on my currently reading shelf for far too long and it's time to admit I am not going to finish it. I can't really pinpoint what the issue is and I do consider myself a fan of David Mitchell. One of the characters in this book is a descendant from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoetand I remain interested in the ambitious plan of Mitchell's "uberbook" made up of his "hyperlinked novels" spanning centuries and genres. For Utopia Avenue, for some reason, the magic dust just wasn't there for me although with Mitchell, I've read genres that I normally don't like horror for The Bone Clocks and The Slade House.

My thanks to Random House for providing an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

I liked this book, it’s the story of a band in the ‘60s with all the attendant problems bands have. In my opinion it was way too long, and I have to forget myself not to skip pages.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Mitchell is one of my absolute favorite modern fiction writers. His voice and writing is excellent; treats words as if they are art. All of his characters and settings are really dynamic and alive. This book comes after Bone Clocks, but features some of the same characters of his previous novels, as they are all part of the Mitchell multiverse.

A little over halfway through and I can't do it anymore. This is partly a result of my expectations going in to this book. I've read and loved Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks, Slade House, and Ghostwritten. I went in expecting something along those lines. This was not it. While there are definite references to his other works in here indicating this takes place in the same universe, it lacks any of their personality and weirdness. It's a slice-of-life story about a 60's band with a lot of name drops. If I took a shot every time a famous 60s musician is mentioned or met I would have died of alcohol poisoning long ago. The band has some troubles but they never really turn out to be serious and are almost always resolved by the next chapter. The lack of plot is matched by a lack of personality. The characters just fall flat and end up as cardboard caricatures. The female folk musician with relationship issues, the wild drummer, the troubled bass player, the virtuoso lead guitar. Had I gone in expecting a historical fiction 60s nostalgia fest I might have enjoyed this. Instead this was a huge disappointment for me.

4 Stars

I struggling to determine how I feel about this book. First and foremost, this is my first experience with David Mitchell, so shame on me for waiting this long. Secondly, I think I was expecting something along the lines of Daisy Jones and the Six.

This story is quite the tale taking you through the struggles of a band in the late 1960's in England. All of the characters are struggling with their own demons along this journey. I loved the beginning of the book and then I started to get very bored. I also abandoned it around 45%. I'm happy that I stuck with the rest of it, I just wish the book was about 300 pages shorter.

A special thank you to NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group - Random House, and David Mitchell for providing me with an ARC.

As a fan of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, I couldn't wait to read his 2020 novel, Utopia Avenue. It didn't disappoint, although it's not my favorite of his books.

Utopia Avenue turns out to be a "psychedelic folk-rock" British band in the late 1960s, not a place. Some characters in the story are connected to those in other Mitchell books and some real-life musicians, like Mama Cass Elliott and Davie Bowie, appear from time to time. As the novel progresses, we see Utopia Avenue rise from obscurity to success. It's the sacrifices and turbulence that the characters experience along the way that make the story live and breathe. Recommended for those who remember and miss the late 60s music scene.

A good story with interesting characters. This book is a musical trip to the 60s. The story is deep and fun to follow. I enjoyed finding out about each band mate and was stunned by the ending.

My kind of book! Time period piece & a page turner. I’m a 60s girl through & through. Thank you for sending this!

Thanks NetGalley for the ARC. This was an entertaining read. If you are into British rock bands of the 60s and 70s you will likely get a kick out of this book

I reviewed for The ArtsFuse:
Book Review: “Utopia Avenue” — A Broken Record?
JULY 17, 2020 LEAVE A COMMENT
By Clea Simon
These days, I worry that David Mitchell is losing touch with reality.
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell. Random House, 592 pp., $30

Creating – making any kind of art – requires a form of split personality. Like a person suffering from delusions, the artist must experience that which isn’t – seeing the impossible. Hearing voices. That’s the source of the creativity. However, to shape these visions into a work of art the creative person must also be relentlessly pragmatic. The artist has to maintain a sense of what works in the real world and be willing and able to prune back the wild imaginings into something that the rest of humanity can make sense of.
These days, I worry that David Mitchell is losing touch with reality.
Mitchell’s new novel, Utopia Avenue, creates – or, really re-creates – a world of intense imaginative abundance: the English music scene of the late ‘60s. It opens, like a classic rags-to-riches tale, at a low point: Dean Moss, a bassist who has been kicked out of his band, is about to be robbed of his rent money – the first in a series of catastrophes that costs him his job and lands him homeless, in a bar, where he is spotted by a “bookish-looking” stranger, Levon Frankland, with dubious intentions.
Dean needn’t worry – yet. Levon’s aim is to take Dean to hear a failing blues band, headed by a has-been who is being propped up by a monster drummer, the decidedly working-class “Griff” Griffin, and an upper-class guitarist, Jason De Zoet, who happens to be a psychedelic genius. (Think of a white, half-Dutch Jimi Hendrix.) Before long, he’s put them together with a buxom – and recently heartbroken – folkie, Elf Holloway. The resulting band, Utopia Avenue, works, for a while, as does Mitchell’s novel. Fully inhabiting his young creatives, he follows them through the trials of life – love and sex, birth and death – as they come together as a band, with chapters about their individual histories neatly slipping in backstory and providing context as they drive around in their broken-down van, the Beast, rubbing the rough edges off each other on the way to fame.
The five – Levon plays a lesser role but has his revelations as well – are not alone. Drawing on Brian Eno’s idea of the “scenius,” Mitchell depicts a world where everything contributes to the creative ferment. Love and drugs in many combinations, sure, but also the presence of a community in which art and experimentation are encouraged. Cameos by stars from John Lennon and David Bowie to Brian Jones and Frank Zappa, as well as scenesters like the plaster casters, toggle between gimmicky and fun, as do the references to real-life incidents (notably the sexual encounter between Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen in the Chelsea Hotel).
At times, Mitchell seems out of his league in describing music – a notoriously difficult pursuit. Although he usually avoids cliché (barring the expected “meteoric” guitar solos), his customary detailed and poetic visualizations tend toward word salad when trying to capture sound: That can be playful, as when “Elf’s Hammond gatecrashes the party, finds its feet, and dances a drunken jig.” At other times, as when Joni Mitchell (in another cameo) “pulses, dives, aches, swivels, regrets, consoles, avows” as she sings, the list of verbs cancels itself out.
There’s so much here – art in a changing world, class and culture differences – that for a long time this hefty novel works. But in what could be described as a fall into classic rock and roll excess, Mitchell can’t resist fiddling – throwing in so many extra fillips and turns that he ruins the beauty of the tune. In Mitchell’s case, the fussing comes largely in the form of references to his earlier works, an increasingly common occurrence in his books. The first time one of these references pops up it feels witty, a tip of the hat to the long-time reader already invested in what fans call the “Mitchellverse.” For me, it was the appearance of “The Cloud Atlas Sextet” by Robert Frobisher, a nod to the composer in Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, that is discovered by De Zoet after a night with Mecca, an Astrid Kirchherr-like photographer. That Utopia’s DeZoet is related to the protagonist of Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (his great-great-great grandson, we eventually learn) is an equally unobtrusive nod to an earlier work. But before long references to these two books, as well as The Bone Clocks, Slade House, Black Swan Green, and Number Nine Dream, are taking over the plot, and undermining its coherence.

Author David Mitchell. Photo: Facebook
The problem is not in the allusions. It is that the narrative diverts to the styles of these earlier works, most notably the fantasy/horror of Bone Clocks and Slade House. De Zoet, we learn early on, appears to be on the autism spectrum. He works hard to translate emotions when in the presence of “Normals,” and both his awkwardness and his talent for masking draw on Mitchell’s writings about his own son. As the book progresses, we learn that the guitarist is also haunted by what appears at first to be an aural hallucination: a “knock knock” sound that may relate to his mother’s burial at sea. When that recurring sound is joined by apparent visual hallucinations – he sees the face of an Asian monk – it would seem that De Zoet’s undefined mental illness is worsening, a not unlikely development in a young artist in a drug-fueled scene. Rather than trust his character and letting this very real issue play out, however, Mitchell links the face to supernatural elements in the earlier books, tipping the book into science fiction.
Fantasy of this sort has become a Mitchell forte, and here serves as the kind of self-referential touch that may thrill diehard fans, as visual Easter eggs in superhero movies do for fans of the original comics. But for other readers – casual fans enjoying a historical rock-world novel or, god forbid, first-time readers unaware of Mitchell’s legacy – it’s maddening. Is this a book built on character? On individuals struggling to create art in the face of ordinary life crises? Or is it horror peopled by body-stealing demons? The two styles work at odds, and worse, and an extended detour involving generational regression via “mnemo-parallax” in pursuit of the 200-year-old monk Enomoto frankly wreaks of self-indulgence, draining the human storyline of its power. Although Mitchell pulls his narrative back for an emotionally appropriate conclusion (barring one reference to an apparent 10-year-old who claims to be 808), it’s too little too late. He’s lost the beat.
Some critics are already using the “broken record” metaphor for Utopia Avenue, largely because of its extended self-references. To these ears the novel plays more like a homemade mixtape. Everything we love about Mitchell is here – the wordplay, the imagery – but the tape’s been used too often. Old voices, fragments of former hits, keep breaking through, and what was charming the first time around has now become disruptive, interrupting what could have been a heady groove.
Clea Simon’s rock-world novel World Enough was named a “must read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her next, Hold Me Down, will be published by Polis Books in September 2021. She can be reached at www.CleaSimon.com

I love David Mitchell and the world he creates, weaving through different timelines in all of his books. I love the magic of it.

But this book didn’t work quite as well for me as his usually do. Utopia Avenue details the rise of the band of the same name, and each chapter is from the perspective of the band members. It’s a fun ride, but you can tell Mitchell gets bogged down in his love for the subject he’s writing about, and that’s when the book drags the most. The celebrity shmoozing is a bit cringey for me.

The best part of Utopia Avenue for me, is where it connects with some of his previous novels, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks. This was exciting for me as a lover of the universe he’s created, but I would imagine if you picked up this book expecting a novel about a band, you would find that part extremely confusing.

Mitchell’s writing is is some of my favorite, and it is as beautifully written as his other books. I just could have gone without some of the celebrity encounters and I felt it dragged out in the middle. That being said, I’m glad to have read it in connection with some of his other books. 3.5/5 stars.

Utopia Avenue documents the lives of a set of band members as they form in the late '60s and then attain fame. I was really excited to have the opportunity to read this novel, as it is my first David Mitchell book. Unfortunately, this one didn't work for me. It was relatively predictable (except for the experiences of one band member, Jasper de Zoet, who struggles with a very unexpected issue...I'll say no more, to avoid spoilers), which made it lull for me. It seemed that the author really had fun with the book, though, and introduced a variety of real-life performers that we encounter over the course of the book. I just wish that it was as fun for the reader.

I look forward to trying out other books by this author, as I know that he is a beloved author to many. Better luck next time.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author, and Random House for the opportunity to read an e-galley.

David Mitchell never ceases to amaze me! I was especially excited for this novel because I devour novels about fictional bands, and ‘Utopia Avenue’ more than scratched the itch for me. One of the most impressive things about this novel is that Mitchell has created a band that feels so real, as if I’d just overlooked or forgotten about their existence. Overall, this is one of my favorite books I’ve read in 2020 and recommend picking it up!