When Evan, twenty-six, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn't know his mother is dying. He still doesn't know the identity of his biological father or the elusive story of his mother's creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. He doesn't know the secrets of his mother's life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence.
Sussman’s writing is nearly always...florid, therapized and sentimental. It is radically un-Dylanesque ... His novel is bereft of drama and close observation. Almost everything in it is rounded off and softened, like pebbles on a shore. If not for the Dylan angle, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all ... There are several sections of this novel, told from June’s perspective, that are winning in their directness and simplicity ... Has a coddled quality; it’s as if Evan were one of those mail-order pears and grew up inside tissue-paper wrapping. The novel’s tone seeks to be childlike but is instead childish.
Sussman writes with lyrical passion, anger, and tenderness about the angst of creativity, the burden of fame, and, most extraordinarily and cathartically, a son’s evolving understanding of his mother’s love and sacrifice.
