Sam Sussman fashions a mother-son love story with a side helping of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Sam Sussman, and Bob Dylan again; you can decide their whether Sussman resembles Dylan for yourself. Courtesy of Getty Images/Penguin Random House

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Imagine going through life thinking you are the unacknowledged bastard offspring of Bob Dylan. Sam Sussman has. He first clued us into this thinking in his essay, “The Silent Type: On (possibly) being Bob Dylan’s son,” published in Harper’s Magazine in May 2021. Now he has written Boy from the North Country, in which he explores this notion over the course of 321 pages.

Part mother-son love story, part meditation on identity and nature vs. nurture, Boy from the North Country – the title is a play on Dylan’s well-known song, “Girl from the North Country” – is, in the author’s words, “a book drawn from my mother’s wisdom.”

The publisher (Penguin Press), presumably with the author’s assent, calls Boy from the North Country a novel. Ordinarily that would mean the work should be discussed as a work of fiction, regardless of how much of it is based on Sussman’s real life. There is nothing unusual about that; many or most novels, indeed, all creative works, draw variously from their creator’s lives, thoughts and dreams.

But given the tantalizing way Sussman and his public-relations team have freely blurred the lines between the book’s main narrator, Evan — Evan is Sussman’s middle name — and Sussman’s real-life story, the book lands in a somewhat pre-determined context.

No one, fortunately, has yet to ascribe the meaningless term “autofiction” to the book, although that doesn’t stop Sussman from slyly suggesting that connection when he has Evan tell the reader, “I sat … trying to read a novel I had taken from my flat in London, the second in an absorbing series written by a Scandinavian epicist with a notoriety for detail.” Why the author didn’t just say outright that he was reading a book by Karl Ove Knausgaard,  whose work is widely (and I think wrongly) held out as an exemplar of autofiction, only Sussman knows for sure. He doesn’t shy away from loading the book with other names of real-life writers and cultural figures – especially the Harry Potter books, which Evan’s mother carries around with her and which Evan talks about at great, and somewhat annoying, length, giving Harry Potter almost equal intellectual prominence as the Bible and Dylan’s songbook.

While the novel jumps around in time, as does the narrative (mostly told by Evan, but turned over to his mother for considerable stretches), the backbone of the story is that Evan’s mother has summoned him from London to return home to the Hudson Valley town of Goshen, N.Y., to visit her. When he arrives, she reveals that she has cancer and is likely dying. She needs Evan’s help to navigate her final months and weeks — and, presumably, she wants to spend her final days reconnecting with her only child. (Sussman himself has a sister who is not included in this fictionalized family drama.)

Evan is all in on taking care of his mother as she begins knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door, and on recommitting to and bringing full circle their intense mother-son bonds. “I’ll be here as long as you need,” he reassures his mother.

Yet despite his devotion to his mother, Evan had a complicated upbringing. His parents divorced when he was two, and his mother had a series of relationships with men. This parade of “stepfathers” in and out of his life was emotionally devastating, leaving Evan never really certain whom to think of as his father. He was primed to fantasize about a real father somewhere out there, particularly one who could help him navigate his life as an aspiring writer.

For years people – teachers, step-fathers, total strangers – had volunteered that Evan bore a remarkable resemblance to Bob Dylan. So when one of his mother’s boyfriends finally tips him off that his mother had known Dylan – first in the early 1970s, possibly again in the early 1990s, around the time Evan (and, for that matter, Sussman) was born – well, he needn’t be Albert Einstein to put two and two together and wonder if Dylan himself was his biological father.

Much is made in the book about Evan’s resemblance to Dylan. Sussman first wrote about his own resemblance to Dylan in his Harper’s piece, and his publisher’s marketing team has played along with this to spur interest in the possibly true story lying behind the new novel. Even the New York Times bought into the hype, printing a whole photo essay to accompany a pre-publication interview with the author called “Is That Bob Dylan in the Mirror?”

Unfortunately, the photographs accompanying the Times article do nothing to help Sussman’s case that he might be Dylan’s son, because, based on the evidence, he only bears the most tangential, generic resemblance to Dylan. Sussman lacks any of Dylan’s most salient features – his thin, curved nose; his bright blue eyes; his carved cheekbones.

Ardent Dylan fans might be fascinated by the vivid descriptions of the painting teacher in whose class Dylan and June meet; Sussman’s real mother met Dylan there too.

We have long known that Bob Dylan took art lessons with Norman Raeben in an open studio on an upper floor of Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1974. Besides being the son of famed Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, Raeben was quite a character – a philosopher as much as a painting coach. And the fleshed-out portrayal of Raeben has the ring of truth based on everything we know about him.

Sussman quotes Raeben as saying “every grain of sand was divine,” foreshadowing the song “Every Grain of Sand” Dylan would go on to write in 1981. “He liked to say there was an idiot wind blinding our age” — that phrase, “idiot wind,” would find its way into a song by that title that Dylan was working on concurrently and which would make its way onto his next album, Blood on the Tracks. 

In the book, June recounts Dylan’s response to Raeben. “He kept saying Raeben was changing everything for him. Teaching him how to dig up the parts of himself that he’d forgotten where he’d buried. I only went to Raeben’s studio once or twice a week and hadn’t realized Dylan was there every day,” she says. “He kept saying Raeben was curing his blindness. He talked about Raeben like he was a biblical prophet, even used that word.”

As the real Bob Dylan once told an interviewer about his time with Raeben, “It changed me. I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever since that day. That’s when our marriage started breaking up. She never knew what I was talking about, what I was thinking about, and I couldn’t possibly explain it.”

It was a high time to be close to Dylan, while he was having his mind rearranged by Raeben and writing songs of pain and anguish over the breakdown of his marriage to Sara Dylan for what would become one of his all-time greatest albums.

For Sussman, the idea that his mother’s relationship with Dylan served as part of the backdrop to some of those songs must have been understandably intoxicating. One can forgive him the occasional cutesy appropriation of Dylan song lyrics into his narrative, such as when he has June recount, “On the bookshelf a rosewood pipe lay atop a book of Italian poetry. I lit a burner on the stove and offered him the pipe,” the details of which are borrowed almost verbatim from Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” (That song’s shifting narrative perspective is also tightly connected to Raeben’s influence.)

Emotionally, the book pretty much leaves Dylan behind and homes in on Evan’s relationship with his dying mother, which seems to reflect where Sussman places Dylan and his mother in his personal pantheon of influences.

Sussman ended his Harper’s essay thusly: “On nights when I reach for creative guidance, I think not of Dylan, but of my mother: her belief in the integrity of any story told on its own terms, whether it’s the tales of King Arthur she read to me as a child or the stories I am trying to write today. When I look at words disordered on the page, I am never sure how being Bob Dylan’s child would help me come closer to beauty or truth. But I know the infinite gifts of being my mother’s son.”

If Sussman knows that Dylan is or is not his father (spoiler alert: we never know for sure), if Sussman is inventing a story that serves as a metaphor for one man’s struggle for an identity, or if Sussman set out to pay tribute to what he portrays as a truly remarkable woman — whatever the case may be — he should be applauded.