I really enjoyed this novel. Mitchell is definitely giving lots of winks to his previous novels and characters, and if you've read ANY of his previous no novels, you're sure to recognize a few here!
This novel struck me as kind of a man's novel, if I may say, There just seemed to be a lot of bad sexual jokes in the first couple of chapters, and I really felt like I could've done without those. But then things improved, and I actually ended up really loving this novel. Not my favorite Mitchell (I think I love Slade House the most), but definitely a fun read. This will make a perfect holiday gift, either for the Mitchell fan in your life, or for that special someone who LOVES the singing 60s in England! There are lots of music, cultural, and literary references of the time periods. A great read!

"David Mitchell is a writer of many talents, a literary wizard whose works display a range and extent that are the criterion for any great novelist. His prose is sharp and swift, he’s light-handed and ambidextrous, and able to blend disparate genres into a modus vivendi that has proven conducive to Hollywood adaptions. His best book is Cloud Atlas, a matryoshka doll of six thematically connected narratives, which, if one were making a premature list of Best Books Since 2000, would be a strong contender for the top spot."

Excerpt from:
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/heaven-metal/

Haven’t finished Utopia Avenue yet but the book is a fascinating read and I certainly intend to finish it. It is incredibly well written and definitely holds the reader’s interest. I’ll be able to write a better review after I finish reading.

When I think of stories that I love, they tend to be heavy on the action and adventure, with a strong plot and even stronger characters. Stories I usually avoid are those that don't seem to go anywhere and that mimic reality a bit too much. Novels by David Mitchell, in my mind, usually fall into the former category, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to read his latest novel, Utopia Avenue. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Utopia Avenue is not at all an adventure story but rather more of that latter category that I try to avoid. This time, though, I am so glad I did not avoid it at all.

Utopia Avenue is a phenomenal story of four very different people who come together to form a band in the late 1960s while the world changes around them. As a character-driven novel, Mr. Mitchell takes great care to create characters and develop them to the point where their stories become real in your mind. To enhance that feel of reality, he intersperses interactions between some of the top musicians and celebrities of the time.

Not only are the characters fabulous in their very real issues, which includes everything from mental illness to financial problems to relationship drama, but Mr. Mitchell also finds a way to create their music through words. He provides enough context for most readers to be able to parse together the very exploratory sounds the band creates. For those readers with a broader musical understanding, he makes you wish there were Utopia Avenue albums you could discover for yourself.

Utopia Avenue may not be exciting. There are no car chases, no magical spells, no quests the band must achieve. At its essence, it is a simple story about a group of four people who are as different as could be but come together through their love of music and performing and a need to make a name for themselves. We see their struggles and their successes and watch them grow into a family through all of it. Through Mr. Mitchell's stellar writing, nothing happens but everything happens. Utopia Avenue may not be the type of story I traditionally enjoy, but it will go on the list as one of my favorite novels of 2020.

Requested as background reading for an editorial feature on BookBrowse:
https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/reviews/index.cfm/ref/hc263936/utopia-avenue#reviews

I’ll always read the next David Mitchell novel. And while I’m enamored with his more metafictional and quirky works, this novel was diverting and certainly captured a mood, time, and place.

Wow, I got sucked right in to this book. I am a child of the 90s, but have an appreciation for the mystique & music from the late 1960s. I am also a huge fan of David Mitchell's complex storytelling through the voices of multiple characters, and I found this work to be more accessible than other of his books like Cloud Atlas.

The story of four strangers, really five if you count their manager, coming together to form a talented band was wonderful on its own. It was also fun to have characters such as Janis Joplin, David Bowie, and Mama Cass show up at varying stages in their fame. I felt very compelled to keep reading, and was sad when it ended.

Utopia Avenue is the band name chosen by a group of four musicians in London in 1967. They're a motley crew, but the music they make together is greater than the sum of their parts. As they fight to break onto the Billboard charts, traveling around Britain in a dubious van and giving interviews, they become close and write some great songs. But as they begin to break through, and to rub shoulders with the great musicians of their time, they also deal with hurdles and heartbreak, from mental illness to a stint in an Italian jail.

David Mitchell's newest novel is pure wish fulfillment. Mitchell has a great deal of fun chronicling the adventures of Elf, Griff, Jasper, Dean and their determined and cheerful manager Levon, as they give a disastrously hilarious interview on Dutch TV, run into everyone from David Bowie to Janis Joplin and enjoy the taste of fame. And because this is Mitchell, there's a touch of the fantastic that shows up abruptly three-quarters through the novel involving the guitarist, Jasper de Zoet. This novel is a lot of fun, but slighter than Mitchell's other novels. There's a lot more detail about the writing of each song the band releases, and who wrote what and why, than I wanted but this may be of more interest to the musically-inclined.

I had such a hard time rating Utopia Avenue. The first 50% was a struggle to get through. While I was interested in the characters and their journeys, the building up of the band and their early struggles, something about the pacing, or perhaps getting used to the jumpiness of the timeline from paragraph to paragraph (Mitchell employed flashbacks in an interesting way, but it did make it hard to follow the storyline), made it difficult for me to focus on the book for more than a few pages at a time. I was in it because these characters were so human, so flawed and yet easy to love nonetheless. There was a fair amount of very sly humor in the dialogue that made up for the duller exposition.
But then somewhere around the halfway mark things started to pick up. It wasn't that the characters got more compelling, because I was in love with these beautifully imperfect artists from the start, but something I can't pinpoint flipped and I couldn't put down my ebook. I think it was that we got more about the band outside of their lives in the band at that point; there was a lot of tragedy across the band, a lot of personal growth, that made the book something more than 'let's watch this band claw their way to popularity', which ultimately made for a more immersive and deeper story.
So I was at 4 stars on this one– 3 for the slow beginning, 5 for the way it picked up from the middle– and then I got to the end. No spoilers, but that ending definitely pushed it up to a 4.5 stars rounded up. Don't take my word for it; go fall in love with Utopia Avenue– the band, the story– yourself.

A book about the formation and rise to fame of a fictional 60s-era rock band? I’m in.

Rating: 5 stars

The gist: This one was right up my alley– expertly-written dialogue, characters you want to root for, and a laundry list of famous musicians as actual characters. I don’t want to know how many royalties Mitchell paid the Bowie estate for the sentence “David Bowie crunched an ice cube.”

Writing: As a David Mitchell newbie, I knew this book had the potential to get weird, but I knew next to nothing about his writing style. It turns out that he writes some of the most readable, plot-driven dialogue I’ve ever seen. Mitchell’s dialogue is witty, it flows incredibly well, and it’s chock-full of quips and references. Sometimes it’s a slog to get through mundane dialogue that adds nothing to the plot. Not the case here!

Setting: This book is essentially a who’s who of 60s-70s musicians. Our main characters chat with David Bowie, get advice from Janis Joplin, party at Cass Elliott’s house, and drop acid with Jerry Garcia. Some find this too gimmicky and forced, but I felt that it fit well with the book’s humor.

Characters: And speaking of musicians, I really liked the band we meet in this book! Elf, Dean, Jasper, and Griff definitely feel like real members of a 60s rock group, and I’m kind of sad that I can’t search for Darkroom or Prove It on YouTube. I particularly felt drawn to Elf and Dean– and I actually cried upon finishing the book. Why do fictional rock bands have to be fictional?

Final Thoughts: Like any good rock album, this book left me with a sense that I’d just finished something great. Time to check out the artist’s greatest hits!

A trippy, cinematic version of Daisy Jones.

By the end, you'll feel like Elf, Griff, Jasper, and Dean are old friends. Writing about music is notoriously difficult, but this was the best attempt I've come across. The writing is descriptive and artsy without becoming pretentious. Fun cameos from famous 60s characters are sprinkled throughout. This was my first David Mitchell, but I definitely intend to explore further now. I took longer than intended to finish this, but mostly because I was savoring it.

I am a big David Mitchell fan since the first time I read Cloud Atlas. Admittedly, it usually takes me some time to get stuck into one of his books, but that just never happened for me here. Part of the problem is me. I've never been a fan of books centered around the music scene. But this also felt like some of the Mitchell magic was missing here. I'll still eagerly read his next book, and hopefully we'll love it as I do his others.

The blurb describes Utopia Avenue as “the strangest band you’ve never heard of”. I didn’t find the band all that strange. The four 20-something band members seemed pretty standard issue for a folk rock group of the 1960s. They had family problems and money issues. They were growing up and exploring their sexuality as they tried to create their music and get it heard. The guitarist also had serious mental problems. He was the most interesting character.

The author name drops a lot of musicians of that era, but that doesn’t make you feel like you were really there. In fact, I found it distracting and I would have preferred that the band not keep bumping into David Bowie or Jerry Garcia. I also would have preferred that the book be 200 pages shorter. The book held my interest, but I was hoping for more. 3.5 stars

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Story of a 1960s folk-rock-psychedelic band, Utopia Avenue, from their formation to their reception in America as part of the “British Invasion.” The story follows the lives of the band members through ups and downs, big breaks, public appearances, tours, songwriting, family situations, and relationships.

The book is structured in the format of an album, with each chapter related to a particular song. The reader is privy to the featured band member’s thoughts, so we get to know each of them. One of the band members experiences mental health issues, and this particular storyline goes rather far afield. I am told Mitchell’s works tend to intersect, but this is only the second of his works I have read, so it occasionally left me scratching my head.

The story features cameo appearances by real people of the music scene, which lends a historical flavor, as do the referenced cultural events of the time (1967-1968). It ventures into the expected areas of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” It is well-written and entertaining. I normally do not care for epilogues, but I found this one exceptional.

Another superb novel by one of my top 5 contemporary authors. More accessible than his other novels and a pleasure to read, start to finish.

I would like to thank the Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. I’ve read two other novels by David Mitchel and enjoy his style. So I was really looking forward to this book. It did not disappoint. This was a very engrossing read throughout. I found it to be one of David Mitchell’s more linear novels and more straightforward than Cloud Atlas, a novel I nevertheless loved. Utopia Avenue is a novel that is organized into parts that are named by the titular band’s albums. Each chapter is named for a song in the album and told from the perspective of a band member. So while unweaving the story, we get the creation and backstory of each song. I found this structure innovative, appropriate for the story it told, and it helped drive the narrative forward quite effectively. The plot revolves around the creation of a rock band in the late 60’s. The band consists of four very different musicians--folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, drummer Peter Griffin, and guitarist Jasper de Zoet--who combine each of their influences to form a unique amalgam of folk, R&B, jazz, and rock. The music is influenced by both the personal events in the lives of the bandmates and historical events going on around them, among them the riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and those that took place during the Vietnam war. There are also appearances by beloved musicians of the era, like Brian Jones, Steve Marriot, and Syd Barrett, to name a few. This novel had some profound musings on the meaning of life, and the role that music and other arts play in shaping history and society. While there is plenty of musical terminology in the book, I found it accessible as someone who is not well versed in music theory. And I really enjoyed the song lyrics and their significance to the band members. Those who have read other David Mitchell novels will love the connections and references to his other works. Still, if this is your first David Mitchell novel, there is still much to enjoy. I loved Utopia Avenue and highly recommend it to both fans of David Mitchell and anyone looking for a fun read.

I usually love David Mitchell's writing. His books are thought provoking and quirky and completely engrossing. Unfortunately I did not find this one to be so. I was only able to read 25% and gave up. I did not find the characters compelling or even interesting. The insertion of famous names into the story was, I'm sure, to create a strong sense of time and place and to add an authenticity to the story of an up-and-coming rock band in the 60s, but, to me, it was just distracting and actually took me out of the story. At times, Utopia Avenue reminded me of "The Commitments" which I loved, but this one just left me bored and unattached. Perhaps I'll finish it later, but for now - no.

I don't generally read band fiction, but something about this book made me want to pick it up. Maybe it was the well-known author attached. Either way it was such an engaging read right from the start and even when you know generally how these kinds of stories go (the band gets together, they toil, the make it big, things go downhill, they break up, etc) it was still thrilling to dive into a new chapter, a new perspective, especially that of Jasper, whose chapter were a bit of a fever dream. This was a really cool trip (hehe) through the swinging sixties and I'm glad that I gave this book a try.

Few writers are as fascinated by the intricacies of interconnectedness as David Mitchell. Fewer still have the literary skill to coherently translate those complexities to the page.

Yet the British author has built his entire oeuvre on doing just that. From his very first novel – 1999’s “Ghostwritten” – he has shown a propensity for creating layered stories featuring a multitude of perspectives from multiple points of view. And thanks to a wonderful narrative broadmindedness and wildly impressive attention to craft and detail, each of those meticulously-constructed books shares connections with all the other works in Mitchell’s canon, binding them all together in a sort of metanarrative – a David Mitchell Literary Universe (DMLU), if you will.

Mitchell’s ninth and newest book is “Utopia Avenue.” It’s a story of the rise and fall of the titular band, an eclectic group of ahead-of-their-time musicians that fate (and an enterprising manager) brings together in London in the late 1960s. Through this idiosyncratic crew, Mitchell explores the peculiarities of fame and success during one of the weirdest, wildest times in the history of popular music.

It’s a sweeping psychedelic story, an alternate pop history that features a slew of famous and familiar names crossing the paths of our heroes in the course of their ascent. It’s a brightly colored and brutal fable that is equal parts celebration and warning regarding the raw power inherent to music. The pull of creative forces can sometimes be beyond our control, leaving the creator no choice but to hang on tight and hope for the best – a best that is far from guaranteed.

London’s music scene in the 1960s is one of the most creatively fallow on the planet. Band after band seeks to follow in the footsteps of iconic groups like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones; all are in pursuit of that elusive combination of creative and commercial success. Most of these bands form organically, through gradually evolving relationships between the players.

Levon Frankland has a different idea. The Canadian expat – a relatively small-time music manager – has an idea. Instead of waiting for the next great band to form on its own, why not put it together himself?

He recruits Dean Moss, a bassist and songwriter from Gravesend, first. He takes Dean to see a band in order to watch two of its members – the strange and brilliant Dutch guitarist Jasper de Zoet and the foul-mouthed jazz drummer Peter “Griff” Griffin. Frankland proposes that the three try to play together and see what happens. Not long after, he introduces Elf Holloway – keyboard player and formerly one-half of a moderately successful folk duo – into the mix.

And thus Utopia Avenue is born.

The wild collection of influences – Dean’s working-class blues, Elf’s folk-pop sensibility and Jasper’s generational virtuosity – makes the band unlike anything else on the scene. And with all three writing songs for the group, the genre blend remains front and center. Their ascent is somehow both halting and rapid, with plenty of bumps as they climb. And consider the time and place, well … there are a lot of notable names who appear along the way.

But even as the band’s star begins to rise, there are forces both internal and external that stand in opposition. Some are merely obstacles to musical stardom, but others present far more impactful and potentially dangerous problems. It’s up to this band of misfits, these square pegs that have finally found their place, to embrace the good and protect one another from the bad.

“Utopia Avenue” offers the elaborate connections we’ve come to expect from David Mitchell. While the book doesn’t necessarily offer the physical scope of some of his other work, in terms of metaphysical scope, it’s spot-on. And the intertextual conversation with his other work is present as well, with numerous nods and allusions to multiple books in the DMLU.

The perspective shifts consistently, with each chapter centering on a band member – we get the individual journeys of Dean, Elf and Jasper even as the overall arc of the band plays out (sorry Griff – Mitchell opts to focus on the three songwriters; as often happens, the drummer is the forgotten man), with enough overlap that we sometimes get multiple looks at the same event.

Mitchell’s affinity for genre trappings isn’t as prominent here as we’ve seen in many of his other works; for the most part, “Utopia Avenue” is relatively straightforward; things do get weird in a mystical/magical sort of way, but only briefly. Otherwise, we simply follow the rise of the band as they move from sparsely attended shows at clubs and pubs up to a world of chart success and trans-Atlantic tours.

It’s an engaging portrait of that particular period, a stylized snapshot of the scene. The hyperrealized cameos from real-life music figures are a delight; densely intellectual and wordy statements of creative wisdom tumbling out of, well … name a prominent figure from the music world of the time. They’re probably around, at least for a minute or two. David Bowie and Brian Jones and Syd Barrett and Janis Joplin and John Lennon and Leonard Cohen and on and on and on – they’re all here, dispensing tightly-packed nuggets of insight. Through this idealization, we see the Utopia Avenue crew perhaps perceiving their heroes as somehow more than they are.

(I’ll be frank – I would REALLY love to know what the music of Utopia Avenue sounds like. Mitchell does good work in describing it stylistically, but as Frank Zappa once told us, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – a quote that Mitchell has Zappa himself offer up in the book. We get lyrics and an idea of how people react to the songs, but not the songs in full. It’s an interesting wrinkle to the overall experience of the book.)

“Utopia Avenue” evokes the spirit of the ‘60s while leaning into its own vision of the time and place. It’s a deconstruction of the pursuit of fame – the thrill of the chase and the chaos that comes with success. It’s about the double-edged sword of creation, the gifts and curses inherent to harnessing the power of art. It’s about the voices surrounding us and within us … and choosing which ones warrant our attention. And in the end, it’s about the music.

Long live rock and roll.

I loved this book. If it weren't for one chapter it would have absolutely been five stars. I was immediately invested in the characters & their stories. I loved that the group was solid throughout the book & all the tension came from outside sources. I've never been in a band, but I'm certain the relationship between the Utopia Avenue members as well as their relationship with their manager is what every band dreams of. I also really liked how the parts were named after the band's albums and the chapters for their songs. One thing I always look forward to with David Mitchell's books is trying to find the hidden connections with his previous books. I've dipped my toes into the "Mitchellverse" before, but now I'm ready to dive in head first and read the rest of his books.