A strong line extends from DeLillo to Jonathan Lethem to Jennifer Egan to Eleanor Henderson to Steve Erickson, with many excellent stops in between somewhere along the way, though, the purer-than-thou asceticism of that “authenticity” became a wearisome trope of its own. The rock novel, broadly speaking, is less concerned with the making of music (an experience hard to translate into prose) than with authenticity of attitude: an aggressive commitment to iconoclasm and a proud aversion to bullshit. And for quite a while, until late in the book, when it more or less sheds its skin, the genre comforts of the rock novel seem all that “Utopia Avenue” is interested in providing. They’re more pleased than disillusioned to be following this classic path. While on tour, one of them is the victim of a trumped-up drug charge. They get excited the first time they hear a song of theirs on the radio. Instead, the band goes through the usual succession of rough gigs in lousy halls (a brawl breaks out in one when Griff, the drummer, gets beaned by a beer bottle) they travel between engagements in a broken-down van, fondly named the Beast. That’s the only way to make those fuckers listen.” Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. We make it louder than anybody else and also better. Though they are, fictionally speaking, near-contemporaries of Bucky Wunderlick, the Garbo-like rock god at the heart of Don DeLillo’s “Great Jones Street,” it’s hard to imagine any of Utopia Avenue’s members sharing Bucky’s credo: “That’s why we’re so great. They refuse to compromise with management on any artistic decision, but they’re never really asked to, because there’s nothing disturbing enough about their music to make anyone try to get them to compromise it. They want to find an audience, and to win over that audience. 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.

Kildare and utopia avenue