Bob Dylan approximately

Publication of the first volume of his memoirs hence raises hopes that oxygen will at last come rushing into this old vacuum, producing not only facts but also some sense of what it's like to be Bob Dylan. Such hopes are stalked, however, by two attendant doubts, reducible to style and content.

As to style, though Dylan's vivid lyrics are succinct enough to be taught to journalism students as textbook examples of concision, his rare specimens of published prose -- consisting, in the main, of a few opaque album liner notes and the botched '60s novel "Tarantula" -- have been as out of control as a first-time driver speeding on ice. One might reasonably wonder whether Dylan would compose a competent memoir or a swampy curiosity comparable, say, to Yeats' discursions on the occult.

Happily, "Chronicles: Volume One" lays that fear to rest. Informal and unadorned in tone, it is tersely focused, laconically witty and crammed with information. (Although the '60s are frequently and rather fatuously defined as an era you don't remember if you were really there, Dylan, who was the Sun at its center, evidently remembers plenty.) It is graced by bursts of admirably apt description -- he refers to an elegant woman's "illegible smile" and summons up "early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships." Its generally sprightly pace occasionally unwinds like an old pocket watch to accommodate slow, rambling scenes that make for some of the book's most compelling passages -- and sometimes actually do hint at what it's like to be Bob Dylan. One of these unhurriedly describes hours spent in an oddball curiosities shop in rural Louisiana. Saying goodbye, its proprietor asks, "Got everything you need, then?" Dylan's reply: "Yeah, but I need some more."

Content is a more serious concern. From the outset of his career, Dylan concealed himself behind a shifting assortment of distortions and outright deceptions. When a Columbia Records publicist interviewed him on the day he signed his first recording contract, Dylan claimed he was raised in Illinois, was kicked out by his parents and "rode a freight train" to New York -- along with other bunk he now acknowledges was "pure hokum -- hophead talk." ("The press?" he writes. "I figured you lie to it.") Has Dylan now come clean? If he hasn't, of what use is an autobiography that conceals more than it reveals, and bends the truth into an artful ensemble of, well, lies? Rather than dealing with such questions directly, Dylan spins them into an extended rumination on the relationship between art, truth and falsehood. More about that in a moment.

"Chronicles" is apt to startle those inclined to pigeonhole Dylan. As a youth, he reports, he loved polka dances, identified with the white-bread crooner Ricky Nelson ("we have a lot in common"), "liked the Kingston Trio" and was captivated by the Johnny Mercer-Henry Mancini hit "Moon River." He was disappointed when Albert Grossman, who later became his manager, didn't invite him to join the folk supergroup that Grossman concocted and named Peter, Paul and Mary. Rather than sneering at commercialism, as did so many of his counterculture contemporaries, Dylan was fond of radio ads ("Before I had ever gone into any department store, I was already an imaginary consumer") and unperturbed by prime-time television. "The sociologists were saying that TV had deadly intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young -- that their attention spans were being dragged down," he recalls. "Maybe that's true but the three minute song also did the same thing."