He Was So Much Older Then
By Janet Maslin
New York Times - Published: September 9, 2010

BOB DYLAN IN AMERICA

By Sean Wilentz

390 pages. Doubleday. $28.95.

There’s a reason the title of Sean Wilentz’s “Bob Dylan in America” makes it sound like a semester’s worth of American Studies. There’s also a reason that a flipped version of the title, “America in Bob Dylan,” could be a college course with the identical curriculum. And Mr. Wilentz’s book actually contains the following marvel of rhetorical pedantry: “What does America tell us about Bob Dylan — and what does Dylan’s work tell us about America?”

What does “Bob Dylan in America” intend to tell us — about anything? Mr. Wilentz’s preface has to do a lot of explaining about its arbitrary, nonchronological and proudly obscure choices of subject matter. The preface also states ominously that what follows will be a load of “hints and provocations, written in the spirit that holds hints, diffused clues, and indirections as the most we can look forward to before returning to the work itself — to Dylan’s work and to each of our own.”

More than 300 pages later, Mr. Wilentz is celebrating one of his oddities: last year’s Dylan album of Christmas-song covers, the one with the polka version of “Must Be Santa.” He is calling this album “a red-ribboned gift to the world.” And he is still sounding baffled about his book’s overall intent.

“With the masked, shape-changing American alchemist,” Mr. Wilentz writes of his subject, careful to use the past tense about Mr. Dylan’s “Christmas in the Heart” in case it some day looms large in posterity, “it was impossible to know too much for sure.”

A word about Mr. Wilentz’s tight connection to his topic: in addition to being a professor of history at Princeton, he is the historian-in-residence for Mr. Dylan’s official Web site, bobdylan.com.
He is also, on the evidence of this act of scholarly devotion, an unofficial cheerleader in chief. According to “Bob Dylan in America,” there is no aspect of American music that cannot be linked to Bob Dylan, even if Mr. Dylan is not always aware of the connections himself. “There isn’t an inch of American song,” Mr. Wilentz writes, “that he cannot call his own.”

Janet Maslin's full review at NYT.