Utopia by Heidi Sopinka review - Art, death and life in late '70s LA

Utopia has a deservedly bad name. The notion of a brave, new world, with a contented population enjoying perfect conditions, is a travesty, one which has emboldened authoritarians for centuries. More's Utopia (from 1516), Gilead, Lilliput, Erewhon, Animal Farm, Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, all represented supposed ideal States - in which nobody would ever want to live.

Heidi Sopinka, a former environmental columnist and co-designer of Horses Atelier, uses her title whimsically.

Her story is set in Los Angeles two generations ago -1978. Instead of an idyllic utopia, she presents dysfunctional adults in a dystopian setting. The pivot of the tale is the suspicious death of the first narrator, an artist working in the desert who "had once been told that I sparkled". After declaring that her art should resemble "the kind of work that seems like no-one made it", her brief narrative contribution segues into a ferocious riff on rage and alcohol.

The fully-fledged artist in then replaced as storyteller by an art student called Paz, who totes around a baby named Flea, child of the previous wife of her husband. The plot hinges on how Paz tries to determine how and why the first wife died.

A story situated so richly and weirdly might head off in different directions. Paz might transform into an amateur sleuth, her new husband into a serial killer, the dead artist into an enigmatic, even sinister figure. If a murder mystery did not work, the tale might be adapted into an ironic comment on the art scene in California. Paz's form of art, after all, entails dressing up as a Country and Western singer, occasionally sporting a bag over her head. In addition, Sopinka arranges for her characters to argue - in a particularly acute and biting way - about the standing of feminist women artists.

Instead of those conventional narrative approaches, Sopinka chooses a distinctly edgy, idiosyncratic way to outline her story. Paz is either deeply sensitive, including to "the faintest vibrating" of a coffee table, or a poltergeist is at work. Readers have been introduced to the dead artist only in passing, in her brief remarks and more extensive writings, through family photographs and as a vision "tall and beautiful in midnight blue". Nonetheless, she haunts and bluffs the other characters.

Throughout, Sopinka's matter-of-fact, almost dead-pan, narration is juxtaposed with penetrating, dramatic dialogues. Her great strength is in recording how people strike off each other, then strike out at each other. She is also talented at describing, in one incident after another, Paz's mental state. She is not mad, but is close, inching towards mental instability. Outside that focus on Paz, the story sometimes meanders, with the level of intensity dropping markedly.