Review of David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Another masterpiece from Mitchell, this one with a very different set of voices.

Lovers of the pop music of fifty to sixty years ago and people familiar with the recording business will undoubtedly savor this book even more that I did. I know zilch about music, any kind of music. For me, this is a book about the magic and craziness of life.

Mitchell explains the name of the band and the title of the book: "'Utopia' means 'no place.' An avenue is a place. So is music. When we're playing well, I'm here, but elsewhere, too. That's the paradox. Utopia is unattainable. Avenues are everywhere." (p. 61)

He puts you inside the minds and emotions of five characters -- four band members and their manager. You know how they think and feel and talk and you come to care about them. They are all very different from one another and from anyone you are likely to have ever met. Yet they are very believable and sympathetic.

With the character of Jasper de Zoet, this novel echoes and interacts with Mitchell's earlier novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. You could say that several if not all of his novels are parts a single tale. So now I have to reread his other novels while this one is fresh in my mind.

He speculates on the nature of the soul and its ability to move from one body to another, from one time to another, themes I explore in my own fiction.
For me, one passage in particular stood out: "Jasper understood that death is a door; and asked himself, What does one do with a door?" (p. 367) I would have used that as an epigraph for my soon-to-be-published novel Beyond the Fourth Door, if I hadn't just finalized the galleys. In my novel, birth is the first door, death the second; and there are at least two more.

Utopia Avenue is punctuated with quips -- terse and memorable phrases, that resonate even when read out of context. Here is a sampling of passages that I underlined while reading:
Many an anonymous Soho doorway, Jasper is learning, is a portal to another time and place. (pp. 55-56)
Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won't rhyme. (p. 64)
...ears don't have earlids. (p. 67)
As Our Savior said, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to change music into money." (p. 70)
TV aerials sieving the dirty air for signals (p. 71)
He feels what you feel when you've lost something, but before you've worked out what it is. (p. 73)
... enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper's eyeballs. (p. 115)
Time is what stops everything happening at once. (p. 123)
Painted by the candle's brush upon the living dark (p. 143)
He thinks of his younger selves, gazing up the same tracks toward a formless future. (pp. 150-151)
Suffering is the one promise life always keeps. (p. 225)
To pianists like Bill Evans, what matters is less the melody itself and more what the melody evokes. (p. 251)
Wisdom is platitudes gussied up. (p. 255)
Music frees the soul from the cage of the body. Music transforms the Many to a One. (p. 296)
He wondered if identity is drawn not in indelible ink, but by a light 5H pencil. (p. 315)
We think we are a One, but you and I know an 'I' is a 'Many.' (p. 376)
With that he slips off, like a man in a story. (p. 406)
Manhattan floats on glassy dark, a raft laden with skyscrapers. (p. 409)
... an honest manager in show business is as rare as rocking-horse shit. (p. 417)
An American moon is wedged between two skyscrapers, like a nickel fallen down a crack. (p. 428)
I'm a mind without a body of my own. (p. 439)
An approaching train howls out of the tunnel and stops to disgorge and load up with more carcasses-in-waiting. (p. 448)
... if ethics aren't gray, they aren't really ethics. (p. 488)
... death is postponeable (p. 489)
... run through the line once, in your mind's ear (p. 534)
Clouds are few, high, and puffy, like dragon smoke. (p. 548)





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