AFTER THE FLOOD

A ramble through the latter-day work of the ever-estimable Bob Dylan.

“No, not that Bob Dylan,” writes literary biographer and anthologist Polito: not the Dylan of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Tangled Up in Blue,” but the far lesser-known Dylan of albums such as Rough and Rowdy Ways and Empire Burlesque. Polito starts with a smart assessment of Dylan’s accomplishments since the 1990s: more than 3,000 concerts, two books, a movie, a weekly radio show, art exhibits on three continents. A point of constant return is one of Dylan’s most recent masterworks, the nearly 17-minute-long epic song “Murder Most Foul,” a major piece in the “memory palace” of Polito’s subtitle. The classical memory palace was a medieval construct for remembering by mentally populating its rooms with facts: Dylan, by Polito’s lights, is constructing “mental structures, particularly songs, that will house past and present, the living and the dead.” One aspect is Dylan’s turn to the Great American Songbook and the albums of traditional folk songs he recorded in the 1990s. As always, Dylan is an elusive figure in his own story; as Polito sagely notes, he may have begun his renaissance with a Keith Richards–like earring and black leather jacket, but he soon would dress in hoodies and eye-hiding hats and sunglasses “that declared he didn’t want to be there.” Yet Dylan was there, always, almost ubiquitous. As Polito also notes, not everything Dylan produced in his legendary career was spun of gold: Even die-hard Dylan heads have to admit that late ’80s albums like Down in the Groove and Knocked Out Loaded are dogs. (Rather uncharitably, Dylan lays the blame for the ups and downs of his 1997 album Time Out of Mind on its producer, Daniel Lanois.) But let Dylan have the last word: “That’s my story but not where it ends.”

An insightful look at Dylan’s lesser-known works, in all their multitudes.