Levon is a music producer who likes Dean’s music and invites him along to a nightclub to hear a virtuoso guitarist play psychedelic covers of Mississippi blues standards. Amping up the already-high Dickensian mode, Dean flips his last coin to decide what to do next the coin disappears down a gutter, and a mysterious stranger appears. He wields his bass guitar as a final attempt to make it as a musician in late 1960s London. He is soon bruised, jobless and homeless. A bewhiskered stockbroker type in a bowler hat smirks at the long-haired lout’s misfortune, and is gone.” Dean heads off again, only to be pickpocketed on his way to pay the rent to his merciless landlady before begging in vain for a pay advance from his boss, a miserly Italian restaurant owner. He slips and falls on black ice: “ Bloody London. The novel begins with a young man, Dean, rushing down a busy street. That said, there is another, darker story here that (depending on how you feel about Mitchell’s overall body of work) either threatens or promises to be the primary source of the book’s considerable, if diffusive, energies and ambitions. Its particular areas of interest and treatment-recent North Atlantic history and culture, celebrity and politics, 1960s historical figures and a briefly famous rock band-are related to music-making. Mitchell’s latest, Utopia Avenue, is at first glance a maximally detailed historical novel.
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