It's been a long time since I've read a book about a major artist that is as much fun — that communicates as much excitement as the author feels for his subject — as Robert Polito's After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace. Its provocative argument is that the past 30 years of Bob Dylan's career are every bit as creative and essential as the first 30 — those early years of Dylan's arrival as a folk revolutionary and a pop star.
For Polito, the albums beginning with 1997's Time Out of Mind on through 2001's Love and Theft and Rough and Rowdy Ways in 2020, as well as his thousands of performances on the so-called Never Ending Tour, are as thrilling and innovative as anything Dylan was doing as a young man. And he argues that if you don't think so, it's just because you haven't been listening.
Polito's book accepts the common idea that Dylan lost his way in the 1980s, putting out mediocre music and giving listless live performances. I'd certainly noticed that something was up when Dylan seemed re-engaged starting in the late '90s, but I was struck by the way Polito casts this as a near-total reinvention.
Key to this, he thinks and I agree, was Dylan letting go of mere careerism in favor of the pursuit of art — making paintings and sculptures; his book-writing, such as 2004's Chronicles Volume 1; the hundred episodes of his "Theme Time Radio Hour;" and a tighter approach to his live shows, which in turn revitalized his studio recordings.
The result of all this activity, Polito argues, is a new method of music-making. Instead of social commentary or first-person pseudo-confessions, he crafts songs in what Polito repeatedly refers to as collage — songs with melodies rooted in the blues and early rock and roll, containing lines and images borrowed, changed or rewritten from a wide variety of literary sources and visual artists.
After the Flood takes the form of an abecedarium or "alphabet book" — 26 chapters, each beginning with a letter of the alphabet that reveals a topic. The chapter beginning with "Q," for example, examines quotations Dylan has embedded in his work; chapter "R" discusses how Dylan rewrites and revises.
The book is itself a flood of ideas, of information, of emotion. As it proceeds, we begin to learn things about the author: That the writing of this book, for example, was interrupted by an illness that was almost fatal but that also inspired him to make sure he completed it.
The 84-year-old Dylan is back out on tour — early reports say he and his band have opted to play acoustic instruments this time around. Meanwhile, Polito has also edited a newly published Library of America collection of key novels by the noir-fiction master Jim Thompson. That makes sense, since After the Flood renders Dylan the hardboiled protagonist of his own ever-lengthening career — one long mystery that will never be fully solved.
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