They aren’t sellouts, by any stretch they’re just not pretentious about their goals. The likable quartet-Griff, Dean, Elf, and Jasper-are not really out to change anything, though, except their fortunes. All this is set in mid-sixties London, when and where it was possible to believe uncynically that new music could change the world. They are introduced to one another by a wise and benevolent manager (maybe the first one in the history of the rock novel) named Levon Frankland, who spots them playing in other, subpar bands and has a hunch, their disparate musical influences notwithstanding, that they would sound great together. In David Mitchell’s novel “Utopia Avenue” (Random House), four such figures-young, reasonably talented, eager to succeed-come together to form a band of that name. Why shouldn’t they get the literary treatment, too? Nor does everyone feel oppressed by celebrity all that star-maker machinery has to get stoked with something, and for every Dylanesque refusenik in the world there are ten thousand volunteers for fame. Plenty of its practitioners make decent music, and decent livings, without feeling the need to subvert or defy anything at all. There’s a side of rock and roll-defiant, anarchic, Dionysian, subversive, doomed, Romantic-that has always appealed to literary novelists, but that’s not its only side.
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