‘Boy From the North Country’ and the Myths of Bob Dylan
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
I know it’s 2026 now, and by the dictates of the Greco-Roman calendar, we are supposed to move on, leave 2025 things in 2025, and go onward and upwards with our new year. The collapsing of the monoculture—and the collapsing of culture in general—make that feel less necessary; no one is discovering new things on the same timeline anymore, and the internet makes everything timeless. A Brazilian funk album from 1968 you heard about today is new to you, the same way the new show on HBO everyone is tweeting about is new to them, is the same way that movie from 1989 you just watched the first time is new to you right now.
Which is to say, this week’s All the Music of All the World is about a 2025 novel I read in December that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s called Boy from the North Country, and it’s by Sam Sussman. Like with most great novels, it’s pretty hard to describe what the book is about per se; it’s kind of about everything. But in specific, it’s the story of a 26-year-old man who goes home to care for his mother, who is on the mend from a recent surgery and chemotherapy from an ovarian cancer diagnosis. The exact parameters of her illness are shifting, the exact parameters of what the man—named Evan Sussman in the novel—is supposed to be doing for and with his mom is shifting, and what it means to be a son and a mother is constantly shifting.
But here’s where it gets twisty, and why I can write about this book in a music column: The center of the book is an existential question that Evan is desperate to have his mom unravel for him. That question: Is his dad Bob Dylan? At first, that question reads as desperate longing—Sussman writes beautifully about what it feels like to be 13, and feel alone, and find yourself and an entire new world in a new artist, as Evan does in Bob Dylan as a kid—but then, it gathers a weird head of steam. One of Evan’s mom’s boyfriends tells him his mom knew Dylan, and not only that, had been in a relationship with him as he was writing Blood on the Tracks. But that doesn’t line up with Evan’s chronology: He was born in 1991, and that album came out in 1975. But then his mom drops a bombshell: She actually was in an on-again, off-again relationship with Dylan, first in the early ‘70s, and then again in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which shuffles loose a memory Evan has of meeting a man who might have been Dylan when he was four or five, who had been in town to visit his mom. On top of it, strangers constantly stop Evan to tell him he looks just like Dylan.
In a race against his mom’s illness, Evan desperately waits for the details to unfurl during his mom’s chemo appointments, and much of the book is centered on her story: How her early life as an aspiring actress and playwright is derailed by multiple terrible men in her life, and how a painting class brought Dylan into her life. Her honesty at his lack of painting talent led to them carrying on a romantic fling, and he played early versions of the songs on Blood on the Tracks in her apartment as she worked on acting auditions. In the end, Evan’s question—is Bob Dylan his dad?—becomes a background to what really matters: He learns who his mom was, as her cancer makes their time together short.
But here’s where it gets even twistier: Sussman wrote the novel with only minimal pseudonyms. This is, broadly, the story of his own life, the difference between novel and memoir as slim as Dylan in his early album cover photos. Boy from the North Country evolved out of a first-person essay Sussman wrote for Harper’s magazine, and most convincingly, his mom is (likely) the reason for the lines in “Tangled Up in Blue” about a poet from the 13th Century speaking to his soul, as she read him Plutarch often. Sussman—and by extension—his mom don’t claim to some higher level of understanding of Dylan or have any demands on him. Just that he was one in a series of men who impacted his mom’s life and made her into the woman who raised Sussman.
It's an interesting dissection of mythology, of art, of belonging, and of how our parents impact us in ways they can and can’t control. But it honestly wouldn’t work at all if it wasn’t Dylan. This kind of book about Jimmy Page or Mick Jagger wouldn’t work. One of the most thrilling parts of knowing Boy from the North Country is thinly veiled memoir is that Dylan’s myth is thoroughly punctured in a grounding, realistic way. He’s spent so much of his 65 years in the spotlight running away from it at various speeds, refusing to be fit into a single mold. He changed styles, singing voices, facial hair, genres, faiths: He treated himself as the ultimate canvas to experiment on, just like, in various ways, we all do. In Boy from the North Country, he’s a searching, open man, looking for a way forward, wanting to make art as vital at 35 as he did at 23. Sussman’s mom thought he was wonderful, and loved being with him, but wanted someone who was earth bound, who wouldn’t run off with a pen and a guitar during dinner because inspiration struck. And that’s a totally normal thing to want out of a partner. That Dylan was the boyfriend who didn’t work is almost an afterthought to her own story, of finding her way from an abused teen who thought she wanted to be an actress to being a holistic health provider later in life. Dylan is treated like just a guy, which seems like the thing Dylan has wished for himself since 1962. In a weird way, it ends up feeling like the most down-to-earth, real portrayal of Dylan in print or in film maybe ever, a way of talking about him that grounds him in some story that is not that he’s the genius poet of rock and roll.
I’m sure Dylan will never comment on it, or maybe even read it, but you can. It’s a beautiful book that will make you want to call your mom and listen to Infidels in equal measure.
-- Andrew Winistorfer
