Michael Magras

Fiction

Two literary home runs

Feature by Michael Magras

These novels put a literary spin on the sport of baseball, recognizing its metaphorical resonance. 

The best works of fiction are often about much more than their ostensible subjects. Novels like The Natural by Bernard Malamud and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach may be set among ballplayers, but the richness of these works lies in their nuanced depictions of ambition and despair. Gish Jen’s The Resisters and Emily Nemens’ The Cactus League have very different perspectives, but they both deal with insecurity: about work, aging, and, especially in the first book, life. 

The more experimental of the two, The Resisters is a dystopian work set in the near future, and it uses baseball to comment on the ease with which totalitarianism can overtake a country. America is now AutoAmerica. The populace is divided into the “angel-fair” Netted—whose job is to produce—and “copper-toned” Surplus, lesser folk whose job is to consume. Among the latter are Grant, the book’s narrator; his wife, Eleanor; and their only child, Gwen.

Eleanor’s work as a lawyer got her in trouble with the AI-run surveillance state known as Aunt Nettie. She has recently returned from jail, but she risks further incarceration by taking a case against the government’s use of a winnowing agent, put into foods to weaken the Surplus. But the government is mainly interested in Gwen, a pitching prodigy so talented that, as a baby, she hit the same spot on the wall every time she threw stuffed animals out of her crib. 

Motivated by plans to build a TeamAmerica that can defeat ChinRussia in the Olympics, Aunt Nettie’s scheme to recruit Gwen from the Surplus’ underground league gives the book its considerable tension. Detailed world building slows the story down, but The Resisters is still a chilling critique of capitalism and a warning about how governments can exploit inequality for nefarious means.

Insecurity is also a driving force behind The Cactus League by Paris Review editor Nemens. A more conventional work, this book’s linked stories revolve around Jason Goodyear, two-time MVP for the Los Angeles Lions, as his team arrives at its new spring training park in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Goodyear’s narrative role, however, is more utility player than star. He appears only peripherally in these stories, most of which focus on the people around him. Among them are young players wondering if they’ll make the opening-day roster, veterans fretting that they’re past their prime, middle-aged women trying to seduce young players, even elderly organists scrounging for gigs. Nemens breaks up these stories with musings from a sportswriter keen to get the scoop on the clean-cut, enigmatic Goodyear. 

The device of the sportswriter as a sort of one-person Greek chorus is unnecessary. More compelling are the stories themselves, which culminate in a depiction of Goodyear in apparent decline, dealing with a divorce and reduced to living alone in a cinder-block building on the stadium grounds. 

In Summer of ’49, David Halberstam wrote that young boys who dreamed of baseball careers were enthralled by the “binding national myth” of the game. As The Resisters and The Cactus League demonstrate, the myth endures, but what a fragile fantasy it can be.

These novels from Gish Jen and Emily Nemens put a literary spin on the sport of baseball, recognizing its metaphorical resonance. 
FictionFamily Drama

Fight Night

Review by Michael Magras

Listen to a 9-year-old, and you could learn a lot about the world. That’s the benefit that Swiv’s absent father would derive if he were to read the letter that constitutes Fight Night, Miriam Toews’ brilliant new book, in which she triumphs over a tough assignment: to write an entire novel in the voice of a child.

Assignments are nothing new to Swiv. As she relays to her father in this letter, she’s been kicked out of her school near Toronto because of her “lashing out tone” after an incident during Choice Time. Now she’s at home with her actor mother and grandmother, and Swiv and Grandma swap homework assignments. For example, Swiv instructs Grandma to compose a letter to Gord, the baby that Mom is carrying.

Toews gives Swiv a voice that is sophisticated, childlike and utterly believable. Readers can see where Swiv gets her pugnaciousness: Mom has been known to rail against capitalism and get into arguments with clerks at tasteful card shops. Mom has reasons to be on edge, however. She’s dealing not only with a pregnancy and an absent husband but also with backstage experiences that have instilled distrust in her profession.

Then there’s Grandma, a free spirit who speaks in what Swiv calls a secret language and is passionate about Toronto Raptors basketball. Her joie de vivre, however, belies a dark history that Toews slowly reveals as the story progresses. 

The novel features a supporting cast of men that allows Toews to comment on examples of the patriarchy at work, from Grandma’s religious older brothers, who packed her off to Nebraska to get a husband and study the Bible after their father died, to directors who subject Mom to callous treatment. This material could have been strident, but the wonder of Fight Night is that it’s a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who have learned to fight against adversity. “You play hard to the end, Swiv,” Grandma tells her as they watch the Raptors on TV. “To the buzzer. There is no alternative.” You could learn a lot from grandmothers, too.

Miriam Toews’ Fight Night is a wonder, a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who never back down.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Review by Michael Magras

You never know what a person might be going through. A famous novelist may be plagued by insecurity. A childhood friend who grew up in a manor house may have epilepsy. Good fortune isn’t always the panacea some would believe.

Sally Rooney (Normal People) knows this well. Her first two novels were laser-sharp investigations into the lives of characters in their 20s and early 30s. She continues this work in her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, an ambitious novel that deepens her earlier themes.

As with Rooney’s debut, Conversations With Friends, the new book focuses on a quartet of characters. Alice is a novelist with mixed feelings about her early success. She says of her public persona, “I hate her with all my energy,” animosity that leads to a spell in a psychiatric hospital.

After years in New York, she moves to Dublin and meets Felix, who works in a warehouse. She invites him to Rome for an event promoting the Italian translation of her book. Their relationship deepens but not without tension over the imbalances between them.

Meanwhile, Alice’s university friend Eileen has become a low-paid editorial assistant. She has rediscovered feelings for Simon, who grew up in the aforementioned manor house and is deeply religious.

Throughout the book, Alice and Eileen exchange long emails. Interspersed among them are disquisitions on socialism versus capitalism, political conservatism and whether the nature of beauty can survive in a social-media era.

Unlike Rooney’s previous novels, parts of this one feel self-consciously artsy, with a chapter-long backstory and paragraphs that run for many pages. But on the way to its heartfelt destination, this flight is still smooth despite brief, mild turbulence. Rooney writes with uncommon perceptiveness, and her ability to find deeper meaning in small details, such as knowing how a friend takes his coffee, remains unparalleled.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a brutally honest portrait of flawed characters determined to prove “that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.”

Sally Rooney writes with uncommon perceptiveness, and her ability to find deeper meaning in small details remains unparalleled.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Lorna Mott Comes Home

Review by Michael Magras

Just as the protagonist of Lorna Mott Comes Home returns to the United States after 18 years in France, author Diane Johnson returns to fiction 13 years after her last novel, Lulu in Marrakech. But while Johnson’s reemergence will be welcome news to fans of her leisurely writing style, the reception to Lorna Mott’s San Francisco homecoming varies among the book’s characters.

Art historian Lorna lands stateside at the time of “the handsome new president, Obama.” She has left her second husband, Armand-Loup, and his “wild infidelity” back in their French town of Pont-les-Puits. As Johnson memorably shows, the U.S. has changed during Lorna’s absence. Astronomical property prices and increased homelessness are two of many manifestations of a widening wealth chasm.

Lorna’s three grown kids from her first marriage are also different. Divorced Peggy makes crafts such as personalized dog collars to make ends meet. Ex-hippie Hams and his pregnant wife, Misty, struggle financially. Curt had “a thriving software enterprise” until a bike accident put him in a five-month coma. He’s now in Southeast Asia, trying to find himself. Complicating the picture further are Lorna’s first husband, Ran; his wife, Amy, “a Silicon Valley millionairess”; and their daughter, 15-year-old Gilda, who gets pregnant by a Stanford-bound 20-year-old.

Sound complicated? It is, but delightfully so, and that’s before an unusual complexity: In Pont-les-Puits, mudslides dislodge the bones of people interred in a cemetery, including those of an American painter. French authorities have named Lorna as the painter’s next of kin and would like for her to pay for his reinterment.

Lorna Mott Comes Home takes time to develop its characters, much like the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton, the comedy-of-manners forebears to whom Johnson is often compared. But admirers will savor the ease with which Johnson moves from one storyline to the next. 

Early in the novel, Lorna gives a poorly received lecture on medieval tapestries that had “a romantic history of being lost, hidden, forgotten through the centuries.” That’s the poignant essence of this novel. Like those tapestries, a life is fragile and vulnerable to being forgotten, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful.

Diane Johnson’s return to American fiction, 13 years after her last novel, will be welcome news to fans of her leisurely writing style.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Light Perpetual

Review by Michael Magras

Of the many questions one might ask after a tragedy, one of the likeliest is: What if? What if the victims had been elsewhere on the day of the disaster? That’s the question Francis Spufford addresses in his graceful second novel, Light Perpetual.

The story begins with a devastating fictional variation on an actual event. On a Saturday in 1944, “an eager crowd of women” comes to a Woolworths in the English town of Bexford to see a wartime novelty: a shipment of shiny new saucepans. Everyone is having fun until a V-2 warhead crashes through the ceiling and “in a ten-thousandth of a second” sends plaster and bricks and roof tiles everywhere. Among the dead are five children.

But what if the bomb had landed farther away? Spufford imagines the lives those five children might have led, starting in 1949, when each would have been 10 years old, and revisits them every 15 years. The result is a clever commentary on the changes in Western society as seen through Spufford’s characters. There’s Alec, who works as a newspaper compositor before desktop publishing threatens his profession; Vern, a wannabe real estate mogul who isn’t averse to shady dealings; Jo, who tries to forge a music career in a male-dominated era; her sister, Val, who falls for a skinhead; and Ben, who grapples with schizophrenia and its repercussions.

Light Perpetual derives considerable power from dramatizing the experiences its characters missed: the chance to build and lose a fortune, to see one’s dreams realized or else rerouted toward more modest achievements, or just to hold a loved one’s hand. Spufford shrewdly reminds readers that tragedy deprives the world of not only noble people but also scoundrels, and this fact is part of the fabric of history.

Late in the novel, Jo says of her attempts to become a recording star, “But none of it worked out! None of it went anywhere,” to which her son replies, “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t any good.” That’s the biggest message of this book: A road might lead to a dead end, but the journey could still be worthwhile.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Featuring vibrant characters, all of whom have rich interior lives, Francis Spufford’s novel is perfect for audio.

The biggest message of Francis Spufford’s second novel is that a road might lead to a dead end, but the journey could still be worthwhile.
FictionSpeculative Fiction

Peaces

Review by Michael Magras

Readers of Helen Oyeyemi’s latest mind-teaser will know they’re in for an unusual experience when the novel’s narrator, a 38-year-old hypnotist, begins the story by describing a set of Czech days-of-the-week underwear, a gift from a former boyfriend. And that’s before the narrator boards a train for a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” with his current love and their pet mongoose. Such is the uncommonly inventive setup of Peaces.

Otto Shin is one half of “a starry-eyed young couple” and has happily adopted the surname of his partner, Xavier. As the novel begins, they and their mongoose have boarded a sleeper train called The Lucky Day at their local station “in deepest Kent.” The ride was a gift from Xavier’s aunt. But, in one of the novel’s many engagingly bizarre flourishes, Otto and Xavier don’t quite know where they’re going. Even more curious: When Xavier calls his aunt from the train to check in on her, she says she’s in the company of someone named Yuri. Yuri claims to be a friend of Xavier’s, but Xavier doesn’t know who he is.

That’s just the start of the book’s many complications. Soon Otto and Xavier meet the train’s owner, Ava Kapoor, a theremin player who lives full time on The Lucky Day and has her own pet mongoose. Ava is days away from collecting an inheritance, but a series of events threatens her bounty. Among the characters that deepen the plot are a composer named Karel, who wrote a piece Ava used to play; Karel’s mysterious son, Přem; and a doctor assigned to assess Ava’s state of mind.

The story’s second half is convoluted, and Oyeyemi tends to overwrite, as when she describes a photo of a “fainting couch upholstered in brocade the color of Darjeeling tea in the fourth minute of brewing.” But fans of the British writer’s previous work, such as the PEN award-winning What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, will enjoy this novel’s surreal twists and imaginative scenarios. Peaces is like the work of a hypnotist: Those open to its allure will inevitably fall under its thrall.

Helen Oyeyemi’s latest is like the work of a hypnotist: Those open to its allure will inevitably fall under its thrall.
FictionSpeculative Fiction

Klara and the Sun

Review by Michael Magras

Anyone who has read Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpieces knows that, in his works, little is as it first appears. Situations are not quite as his unreliable narrators believe. First-person protagonists speak in formal prose that sounds not quite right. And his later works are wonderfully unclassifiable—not quite detective fiction or dystopian sagas but borrowing from these forms while veering into original terrain.

He continues his genre-twisting ways with Klara and the Sun, a return to the dystopian tenor of Never Let Me Go that, like that work, explores whether science could—or should—manipulate the future.

Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend available for purchase. Like Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day, she speaks in quirky locutions such as “I was able to bring several speculations together.” She and other AFs are on display in a store, where the prime real estate is the front window. The advantages of that position include access to the Sun, from which AFs derive “nourishment.”

A teenager named Josie, suffering from an unspecified illness, insists that her Mother purchase Klara. What follows is the story of Josie’s home life and Klara’s role in the family’s affairs. Among them are the Mother’s trauma from the death of another daughter, a young man sweet on Josie and, most provocatively, the issue of whether science can correct injustices wrought by illness or one’s station in life.

Ishiguro is an expert at slowly doling out information to build tension. The wonder of this book is that he incorporates many elements, from environmental damage to genetic testing, without the story seeming heavy-handed.

But the predominant theme in Klara and the Sun is loneliness. “Humans, in their wish to escape loneliness,” Klara says, “made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom.” As Ishiguro notes in this brilliant book, each person has their own Sun, a source that gives them strength, and feels enervated when the source leaves them in shadow.

Kazuo Ishiguro continues his genre-twisting ways with Klara and the Sun, a return to the dystopian tenor of Never Let Me Go that, like that work, explores whether science could—or should—manipulate the future.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Zorrie

Review by Michael Magras

Laird Hunt has a reputation for sensitively chronicling women’s lives, as in Neverhome, his Civil War tale of an Indiana woman who becomes a Union soldier. He returns to the Indiana setting in his delicate new novel, Zorrie, a powerful portrait of longing and community in the American Midwest.

Zorrie Underwood is born in the early 20th century. After her parents die of diphtheria, she is raised by a stern aunt who tells her “people [are] born dreaming of devils and dark roses and should beware” and slaps Zorrie if she wakes up crying.

These experiences would cow a less hearty soul, but not Zorrie, who can beat almost every boy in school at arm-wrestling. When she is 21, her aunt dies and leaves her with nothing, so Zorrie sets out on her own. The most consequential of her early jobs is at the Radium Dial Company, where she decorates clock faces with paint containing a translucent powder that glows. Along with her colleagues, she is unaware of its toxic effects.

Soon she gets a job splitting and stacking wood for elderly couple Gus and Bessie. She marries their son, Harold, “the best-looking fellow Zorrie would ever see.” Hunt movingly documents their life on the farm, from picnics and watermelon seed-spitting contests to Zorrie’s continuation of her work during a pregnancy that ends in a miscarriage. Hunt chronicles the events of Zorrie’s life with swiftness and precision, including Harold’s death during World War II and, most enigmatically, Zorrie’s acquaintance with Noah Summers, whose wife is confined to a state hospital for setting their house on fire. Hunt tells their stories with a quiet sensitivity rarely seen in modern American fiction.

Late in the novel, when thinking of her neighbors and the world at large, Zorrie realizes “it was silence and not grief that connected them, that would keep them forever connected, the living and the dead.” Despite occasional dry passages, Zorrie is a poetic reminder of the importance of being a happy presence in other people’s memories.

Laird Hunt has a reputation for sensitively chronicling women’s lives, as in Neverhome, his Civil War tale of an Indiana woman who becomes a Union soldier. He returns to the Indiana setting in his delicate new novel, Zorrie, a powerful portrait of longing and community in the American Midwest.

FictionFamily Drama

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

Review by Michael Magras

As challenges go, fatherhood can be beautiful and rewarding. The health of one’s child, however, may complicate matters. A couple forced to confront some of these challenges is at the center of Peter Ho Davies’ excellent third novel, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself.

The book is told from the perspective of a man who is now a writer but used to be a scientist. At the outset, in wrenchingly spare prose, a doctor gives the man and his editor wife, expecting their first child, a grim prognosis: The fetus had mosaicism, a rare condition that offers only “a tiny chance. BB-sized” that the baby will be born in normal health. The couple decides to abort.

The next pregnancy produces a seemingly healthy boy, until he turns blue on the delivery table and has to spend four days in the neonatal intensive care unit. Davies infuses these scenes with heartbreaking detail, as when the father sits by the incubator, talking to his son, saying, “Little guy, it’s Daddy,” while an IV drips into a tiny arm.

After the boy recovers, Davies brilliantly describes the quotidian aspects of raising a baby that leave the couple “floaty with exhaustion,” from shopping for baby monitors to, in one of many invocations of Schrödinger’s cat, wondering whether the quiet of the baby’s room means their child is sleeping or dead.

When a kindergarten teacher suggests the boy may be autistic, the couple resists having him tested for fear of what they might learn. This leads to more soul-searching on the part of the father, even prompting him to volunteer at an abortion clinic to help him sort through lingering feelings about the couple’s earlier decision.

Though the child comes across as an abstraction rather than a fully fleshed-out character, the eloquence of Davies’ writing will make readers sympathize with a father trying to be a good parent and a good person and wondering if he’s succeeding. A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is a poetic meditation on the nature of regret and a couple’s enduring love through myriad difficulties. It’s a difficult but marvelous book.

As challenges go, fatherhood can be beautiful and rewarding. The health of one’s child, however, may complicate matters. A couple forced to confront some of these challenges is at the center of Peter Ho Davies’ excellent third novel, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Adrianne Geffel

Review by Michael Magras

Depending on one’s perspective, a work of art deemed avant-garde is either a welcome innovation or a stinging repudiation of the status quo. Few people are indifferent. And no avant-garde artist provoked more extreme reactions than Adrianne Geffel, the fictional pianist at the center, or perhaps it’s better to say the periphery, of Adrianne Geffel, music critic David Hajdu’s debut novel.

The reason periphery is a tempting word here is because the reader rarely hears directly from Geffel. Hajdu has structured this clever work as an oral history, the unnamed author of which has long known about the “idiosyncratic American pianist and composer” active in the 1970s and ’80s, whose works inspired a Sofia Coppola film and a George Saunders story and who had a neurological condition that prompted “auditory hallucinations.” She “heard music almost all the time.”

This book is an attempt to figure out what happened to the “Geyser on Grand Street,” as a SoHo newspaper dubbed her, who disappeared in the mid-1980s at age 26. A portrait of Geffel slowly emerges through interviews with people who knew her—from her parents, who fed baby Adrianne formula in part because they could buy it at a discount, to her teachers at Juilliard and a classmate who insinuated himself into Geffel’s life to latch on to her fame.

The result is the literary equivalent of negative space in art: creating a picture of a subject by focusing on surrounding details. Hajdu does this to entertaining effect, even when some of the interviewees’ stories wander and slow the narrative momentum. He has fun satirizing figures in the music world, among them teachers who think students should get into prestigious schools through connections because it’s more “convivial” that way, critics who use their interview with the author to plug their books, and prominent publications that report on trends in music long after the trends have become passé.

Adrianne Geffel is an uncommon treat: a smart parody that even detractors of the experimental are likely to welcome.

Adrianne Geffel is an uncommon treat: a smart parody that even detractors of the experimental are likely to welcome.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Homeland Elegies

Review by Michael Magras

Awakenings can be brutal. Consider Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author Ayad Akhtar, growing up in Wisconsin as the child of Muslim doctors who came to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1968, riding his bike around the neighborhood and listening to a father who thought America was the greatest place in the world. Along the way to becoming a celebrated American playwright, Akhtar would learn harsh realities about the only country he has ever called home, a country where the treatment of people of color is very different from that of white people.

In Homeland Elegies, Akhtar mixes fact and fiction about the awakening that marked his journey to Broadway. He has divided the book into eight chapters, bookended by an overture and coda about a professor who has conflicting feelings about her role as a teacher and who taught Akhtar that America is still “a place defined by its plunder.”

Racism dominates each story. Among the characters is one of Akhtar’s father’s best friends from medical school, a devout Muslim who grows disenchanted with America and who was secretly the love of Akhtar’s mother’s life. There are also white police officers and mechanics in Scranton, Pennsylvania, whose prejudices become alarmingly manifest when Akhtar’s car overheats on the highway, as well as an unscrupulous Muslim businessman who gives white America a taste of its own capitalism by exacting revenge on U.S. towns that wouldn’t build mosques.

The book’s most nuanced sections involve Akhtar’s father, a complicated man who grows to like Donald Trump after treating the future president for a mysterious ailment in the 1990s. In a powerful closing chapter, Akhtar documents his father’s disillusion with Trump as part of a larger story of a malpractice suit in which the elder Akhtar’s religion is a complicating factor.

Despite long tangents, Homeland Elegies shows what American life is like for people with dark skin, as when Akhtar and his father park their car poorly outside a convenience store, a miscue that gives a gun-toting white man an excuse to hurl racist imprecations. For readers unaware of such assaults, Akhtar’s latest will be a rude awakening, and an important one.

Despite long tangents, Homeland Elegies shows what American life is like for people with dark skin, as when Akhtar and his father park their car poorly outside a convenience store, a miscue that gives a gun-toting white man an excuse to hurl racist imprecations. For readers unaware of such assaults, Akhtar’s latest will be a rude awakening, and an important one.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Pull of the Stars

Review by Michael Magras

As everyone now knows, the challenges of being a health care worker are exponentially greater during a global pandemic. As Emma Donoghue explains in the author’s note to The Pull of the Stars, her thinly plotted but moving new novel, the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic inspired her to write this work. She couldn’t have foreseen how relevant this story would feel upon its publication.

The novel takes place over three days in Dublin, from Halloween to All Souls’ Day, when World War I is winding down and the flu is ravaging the population. Nurse Julia Power is a single woman about to turn 30. She lives with her younger brother, Tim, who suffers from war neurosis and has remained mute since his return from the front. One morning, when Julia arrives at the Roman Catholic hospital where she has worked since age 21, she learns that the head of the maternity/fever ward has taken ill. Julia is to serve as acting ward sister in her stead.

In spare prose, Donoghue documents Julia’s harrowing three days. Her patients are pregnant women of various economic backgrounds. Some characters are more fully fleshed out than others, but all suffer from the flu and other complications, much of which Donoghue renders in graphic detail. Among the people assisting Julia is the book’s one real-life figure: Kathleen Lynn, the physician and Sinn Féin activist who was instrumental in the Easter Rebellion of 1916.

The book’s most touching sequences dramatize the budding friendship between Julia and Bridie Sweeney, a volunteer who was raised in a convent and gives her age as “about twenty-two.” The stories of Bridie’s upbringing are among the book’s most devastating passages, as when she tells Julia that punishments at the convent sometimes involved hanging the transgressor by the hair from a coat hook.

At its best, The Pull of the Stars confronts a reality as pertinent today as it was in 1918 Ireland: Some people are part of what Bridie calls “the pipe”—orphanages, reformatories, prisons—whereas others benefit from greater privilege. Donoghue’s novel is a plea for an end to the inequality that pandemics make all the more stark.

The Pull of the Stars confronts a reality as pertinent today as it was in 1918 Ireland: Some people are part of what Bridie calls “the pipe”—orphanages, reformatories, prisons—whereas others benefit from greater privilege. Emma Donoghue’s novel is a plea for an end to the inequality that pandemics make all the more stark.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Utopia Avenue

Review by Michael Magras

David Mitchell has written some of the most innovative novels of the past 20 years, from the post-apocalyptic Cloud Atlas to Slade House, a ghost tale about a mysterious residence “that only blinks into existence one night every nine years.” His latest, Utopia Avenue, is a journey into new territory and a return to earlier themes. One of the biggest surprises here is that an author who has built a reputation for creating original worlds now seeks originality in a seemingly familiar milieu: a British rock band’s brief moment of fame in the psychedelic heyday of the late 1960s.

It’s 1967, and impresario Levon Frankland, on the lookout for fresh talent, spots bass guitarist Dean Moss, a 23-year-old “long-haired lout” who’s desperate for a gig and a place to live. Soon, Dean joins a band that includes drummer Peter “Griff” Griffin, no stranger to having bottles thrown at him during a set, and lead singer Elf Holloway, formerly half of a folk duo with her Australian ex-boyfriend, a man who isn’t above using thievery and unfaithfulness to achieve his goals.

So far, so familiar, but this being a Mitchell novel, a wrinkle is not too far off. This novel’s wrinkle involves lead guitarist Jasper de Zoet, a man who, ever since an afternoon on the cricket pitch during his youth in the Netherlands, has heard a persistent knocking in his head. The knocking has now returned, as has the message tapped out by this foreign entity inside his brain: “Life and liberty . . . De Zoet must die.”

Utopia Avenue is more ramshackle than Mitchell’s earlier works. Some plot elements, including episodes of revenge, jealousy and blackmail, are exactly what one might expect to find in a story of newly celebrated musicians. Mitchell fans, however, will welcome the continuation of flourishes from such earlier works as The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks, including the reemergence of characters from those novels and the neologisms that made Mitchell’s previous works such mind-bending experiences. Mitchell’s song may be different, but readers will recognize the tune.

David Mitchell has written some of the most innovative novels of the past 20 years, from the post-apocalyptic Cloud Atlas to Slade House, a ghost tale about a mysterious residence “that only blinks into existence one night every nine years.” His latest, Utopia Avenue, is a journey into new territory and a return to earlier themes.

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