Here Be Mothers

Phil Nugent on the use of a mother's loss for political causes

Chronicles

In truth, it's been about three weeks since I finished Dylan's Chronicles and a week and a half since I ended The Final Solution, and I didn't take notes, so these are going to be brief book reports, of the nuggets from each that stuck with me.

Dylan's book feels more personal than a plot outline might suggest- he dances around the big moments of his personal life, barely identifies half the leading characters, and doesn't even bother to give the names of his wife and children. There's a veil of that part of his life, and I'd be very surprised if his subsequent books lift it. But he's incredibly intimate about both his artistic influences and his creatives process. He skips over most of the large successes in his life, jumping from playing in small clubs to being shackled by the unsought position as "spokesman for his generation," to feeling completely dead and finished as anything but a nostalgia act and starting a teeth grindingly difficult collaboration with Daniel Lanois on an album that didn't really inspire a lot of affection. Dylan has a great memory for the wrong side of creativity. The strongest moment in the book is when Dylan's trying to work with Archibald MacLeish on a musical play that he knows is doomed from the start, and suddenly spies a copy of Ulysses on MacLeish's bookshelf. Dylan wants the playwright to explain the book to him, but he's aware he can't ask a single question. I don't have the book in front of me, so I'm probably mangling this, but Dylan conveys the sense of being trapped inside himself better than anyone else I can think of in the five minutes before this coffee shop closes for the night. More later.