PanFinancial Times (UK)Those expecting narrative pyrotechnics to match the phantasmagorical times will be disappointed. The story is beach-book simple ... I spent much of the early part of the book trying to imagine whether Utopia Avenue were any good. What might the group’s music actually sound like? ... This sudden rush of real characters in Mitchell’s make-believe is repeated throughout the book, and not in a good way. Snippets of dialogue provide frequent, unintended comedy ... As Utopia Avenue’s success grows, the band members mingle with ever-more famous characters, ever-more clamorously ... John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and Leonard Cohen drift in and out of Utopia Avenue’s rise to prominence in equally clunky, occasionally mind-boggling, moments ... These clumsy attempts at verisimilitude have the opposite of their intended effect, distracting us from the various dramas affecting the members of the band...These are all well-enough described to keep us turning the page, but have a kind of soap-opera relentlessness about them. Mitchell disappointingly shirks the challenge of grounding them in a more sophisticated way in the epochal changes of the time ... There is scarcely any politics in the book, little hint of the social turmoil around the band, whose lyrics are crudely inward-looking and autobiographical, each song prompted by the latest psychodrama. This neglects the fascinating tonal tension of the 1960s, between the era’s idealism — much of it drug-induced, bogus, or both — and its narcissism ... Utopia Avenue’s lightweight ramblings by comparison leave us with little warmth towards, or respect for, the band, fatally undermining Mitchell’s storytelling ... The novel ends with an elegiac note for a newly discovered album by the group, written by Elf in 2020, which acts as a touching epilogue to the band’s brief spell in the limelight. The sense of abiding nostalgia in her words opens an entirely new theme for the book, and might have made a better starting point for Mitchell. His virtuosic vaulting across the decades would surely have served him better than this immersion into a world he has failed to capture.
Philip Norman
PositiveFinancial Times\"... [a] lucid biography ... Mirroring Clapton’s life, the book begins to turn almost to soap opera as the rock star gets embroiled in torrid relationships and hard drugs ... Art has a way of airbrushing actuality. The middle part of Slowhand could act as a #MeToo primer for highlighting the appalling treatment of women during the age of so-called sexual liberation.\
David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
MixedThe Financial Times\"It is Lynch’s own writing, lacking both wit and real insight, a little throwaway, that disappoints. Lamest of all is his reliance on cute anecdotes about celebrities that are meant to charm, but end up sounding banal — and occasionally creepy.\
Jeffrey Eugenides
MixedThe Financial TimesHis fans may feel short-changed: Eugenides is a skilful handler of tangled plot lines and character study, qualities that are by necessity sacrificed in the deftly drawn sketches here ... ['Complainers'] would make a compelling first chapter of a novel; yet the relationship comes to a hastily drawn conclusion: Della’s condition inevitably worsens, and Cathy departs the scene abruptly. As with some of the stories that follow, we are left with an evocative, minor-chord ending, rueful in tone but ultimately a little unsatisfying ... Eugenides broadens his range in the final story, written this year, that gives the collection its title.
