Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed

Literary critic Rosenbaum (In Defense of Love) takes a winding, rhapsodic look at Bob Dylan’s life and work. In 1977, Rosenbaum conducted a weeklong interview with Dylan, who was working on Renaldo and Clara, a 1978 film that received dismal reviews and was quickly pulled from theaters. That disappointment, Rosenbaum suggests, in combination with Dylan’s impending divorce and exhaustion, precipitated a “profound spiritual crack up” wherein he encountered a vision of Jesus in a Tucson motel and became a born-again Christian. By the early 1980s, Dylan had “recovered” and returned to secular Judaism, moving on from “scolding, sermonic” performances to an “utterly unexpected” songwriting style that “entangled” thoughts and ideas without totally refusing coherence. The author also highlights Dylan’s return to metaphysical themes, a lifelong focus evident in such songs as “Desolation Row.” With a digressive style that vacillates from barroom banter to academic criticism, Rosenbaum ranges far and wide across Dylan’s oeuvre, holding forth not only on the possible origins of his “mystical” leanings but also his voice and mannerisms (“I’m prepared to argue that no one today smokes cigarettes more expressively than Bob Dylan”). In his obsessive effort to understand his subject, Rosenbaum vividly—if sometimes eccentrically—succeeds in capturing what it means to be a Dylan devotee, burdened with awe, ambivalence, and an overload of unanswered questions. It’s a trip. (Oct.)