Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s John Hughes. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.

Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s John Hughes. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.Perhaps no American musician has been so scrutinized or difficult to scrutinize as Bob Dylan who, even after all these years, continues to confound. The subject of countless books, biographies, documentaries, interviews, essays, articles, and reviews spanning more than five decades of American history, arguably no American popular culture icon has elicited so much discussion from so many sides of the American cultural, social, and political landscape. For all of his time in the spotlight, Dylan remains a mystery to many-a master of words who, over a lifetime of performances and productions, is still as tricky to decipher as ever. Of course, this hasn't prevented a multitude of admirers and detractors from trying, producing a rich body of scholarly work in "Dyanalysis" over the years with John Hughes's Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s providing the latest addition to this collection.Focusing on Dylan's development as an artist during the pivotal decade of the 1960s, Hughes's analysis of that development sidesteps many of the more familiar trappings of Dylan's personal life and legacy to present, instead, a portrait of Dylan in the Sixties as an evolving, experimenting, improvising, self-discovering performer who used his "performances" to create a persona that wouldn't and, therefore, couldn't be pinned down. Splitting his book into two parts, "Themes" and "The 1960s," Hughes first lays out his major premises in a series of short interpretive readings of Dylan's many distinctive, yet elusive, "presentations of self" in the Sixties addressing, specifically, his voice, humor, mannerisms, interviews, photographs, press conference and concert appearances before turning, in the second half of his book, to a more lengthy, yearby-year, critical chronological analysis of Dylan's songs and albums from 1961 to 1969.By any scholarly standards, this is a carefully researched, meticulously documented, thoroughly informed piece of academic work that is, at times, both illuminating and obscuring. On the plus side, Hughes does a outstanding job of introducing and linking the changing nature of Dylan's presentations, appearances, arrangements, and productions in the 1960s to the progressions in Dylan's sense of self and self-meaning, and, in so doing, he provides readers with many insightful explanations and motivations for these progressions. Empirically backing up his close readings and interpretive analyses with an abundance of source material while critically drawing from multiple disciplinary perspectives including, among others, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology, Hughes convincingly lays out his book's major contention that Dylan's transformations and vagaries as a person, personality, and performer from 1961 to 1969 were neither chameleon-like nor indefinable. If the essential Bob Dylan was always hard to see, Hughes argues, it was because that essence-forever emerging, inventing, and becoming-was continually "leaving behind" to "move on."Juxtaposing the transitory and the emancipatory, Hughes methodically lays out the linkages between Dylan's temporality and essentiality in page after page of scholarly analyses. …