Billy Bob's Book Review Corner

First post on a new site? How about some stale content I wrote in 2021? Yes, how about you shovel this old, stale, five year old content directly into your mouth and just chew on it for a good, long time, because that’s how much I value your attention. The old reposts will continue until morale improves.

All right, it’s Friday afternoon – time for the first ever edition of Billy Bob’s book review corner. I just finished reading “Utopia Avenue” by David Mitchell. He’s famous for writing “Cloud Atlas” and “The Bone Clocks”, two novels with reincarnation as a central theme, but which otherwise could not possibly be any more different from each other. Cloud Atlas is the more serious of the two, with a unique and very creative narrative structure, whereas The Bone Clocks, despite being concerned with some pretty mind blowing ideas about the nature of life and death, is really just a kind of zany adventure story set against those ideas as a backdrop.

So, which David Mitchell are we getting with his new book, Utopia Avenue? Serious, academic Mitchell or wacky occult adventure Mitchell? “But wait”, you’re thinking. “There’s a third choice. What if David Mitchell grew tired of being the weird reincarnation guy and just wrote a stupid book about a fake band from the 1960s with a bunch of fake cameos from real celebrities?” Well, if that was your guess, your prize is that you no longer need to read Utopia Avenue, because you already know what’s in there.

Utopia Avenue is a book that tries to give an answer to people who think dumb thoughts like “I wonder what it would have been like to be in a semi-famous rock band in 1967”. Imagine running into David Bowie at a party – but he’s not even famous yet. Oooooh. Or what if you met Syd Barrett in a movie theater and he was all burned out? Or what if you dropped acid with Jerry Garcia at his house in San Francisco? Oh shit, spoiler alert. But don’t worry – I haven’t ruined the book for you because these are just three of SEVERAL DOZEN such scenes in this NEARLY SIX HUNDRED PAGE NOVEL. It pains me to make this comparison, but when critics dunked on Ernest Cline for Ready Player One’s approximately twenty five 80s references per page, I never thought an author of Mitchell’s caliber would decide it was a good idea to do the same thing, except with the 60s.

None of this is to say that you can’t write a pastiche of a bygone decade. I loved Rabbit Run, after all, but then again, Rabbit wasn’t smoking weed with Janis Joplin on the roof of a famous hotel in New York City, so I guess that’s probably why I didn’t roll my eyes so hard that I almost went blind while I was reading it.

If you’re a fan of David Mitchell, which I had thought maybe I was up until this point, you will spend the first 400 pages of the book thinking that any minute now, shit with this band is going to go OFF THE RAILS. I won’t spoil The Bone Clocks for anyone (because it is awesome and everyone should read it) but that book is INSANE. You’re reading it the whole time thinking, what the fuck is wrong with this guy’s brain that made it so he could come up with this CRAZY SHIT? So you’re waiting the whole time for something similar in Utopia Avenue, and there’s a little of it, but it is so disappointing, and what is there is clearly just a nod and a wink to the author’s fans. The book really is just about a 1960s rock band that meets all the other famous people of the decade.

That’s it. Like, you can’t understand how crushing that is. It’s like, if you picked up a Murakami novel and the usual Murakami crap was going on, like twenty pages describing a guy cooking lunch in his apartment, and you’re sitting there on the edge of your seat, “Any minute now, this guy’s going to find a back door inside a phone booth that takes him into an alternate dimension”. How mad would you be if it never happened and Murakami’s character just went to the laundromat and maybe picked up some groceries or something and that’s ALL THAT HAPPENED. You’d want to blow your fucking brains out. DAVID MITCHELL, WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO BLOW MY BRAINS OUT?!!!