Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan

The primary challenge facing any comprehensive biography of Dylan is to trace a consistent path through each of his many musical incarnations, uniting the high and low points of his career into a convincing portrait of the artist. Sounes succeeds at this for a while, but seems to lose the thread somewhere after the mid-1970s. So, while the raconteur of the Rolling Thunder Revue still feels connected to the mischievous early folksinger, the playful acoustic poet, the electric rabble-rouser, and even the gloomy, defeated minstrel of Blood on the Tracks, the progression from Rolling Thunder to holy roller and beyond marks a rupture in the narrative from which the book never quite recovers. By the end, Dylan has become a barely coherent shadow, a figure who, strangely unconnected from his own past, deserves a measure of empathy but otherwise hardly seems to warrant the reader’s interest. Still, Sounes has unearthed many new details about Dylan’s private life that were either overlooked by or unavailable to previous biographers, and that plus its captivating first half does make this book worthwhile reading for Dylan’s many fans.

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