I take another look at the CD cover: the front has Dylan unadorned, vulnerable, looking hardly different -- faint mustache, lined face, bags under the eyes notwithstanding -- from his pictures in the '60s; flip the album over and you get some kind of Mexican bandito, whose mustache, along with white hat and quarter-smile, serves as a disguise. Dylan is hardly there at all.

But it's the lyrics, finally, that make "Love and Theft" what it is -- an album in which the individual and the generic, the topical and the timeless, merge with maniacal intensity: "New Morning" crossed with "Time Out of Mind," juiced by turns with opium and speed. Talk about prophetic: "Every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick/ Happiness comes suddenly and leaves just as quick/ Any minute of the day the bubble could burst ...." And: "I'm stranded in the city that never sleeps ... / Some things are too terrible to be true ... / The sun in the city leavin' at 9:45/ I'm having a hard time believing some people were ever alive." And: "Oh who knows who the bell tolls for, love/ It tolls for you and me" (that one rolling with the jaunty beat of the New Morning-ish "Moonlight"). And: "High water rising, shacks are slidin' down/ Folks lose their possessions, folks are leaving town .... / Things are breakin' up out there/ High water everywhere." And: "George Lewes told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew/ You can't open up your mind, boys, to any conceivable point of view/ They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5/ Judge says to the high sheriff, I want him dead or alive."

If Dylan manages to predict the next day's news by once again tapping into the language of millennial apocalypse, he also captures contemporary anomie (his own, ours) by inventing a narrator -- or narrators, it's hard to tell -- who descends into the hell, or purgatory, or limbo, of America's mysterious rural past, which seems to be located mainly in the south. Contemplating the "earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone," "goin' where the wild roses grow," following the southern star, crossing rivers, staying in Mississippi a day too long, staying with his not-real Aunt Sally, dreaming of Rose's bed, proposing to marry his second cousin, our hero (or is it heroes?) (or anti-hero/heroes?) walks the line between love and battle, not that there's much of a difference. Between "Don't reach out for me, she said/ Can't you see I'm drowning too?" and "Sugar baby get on down the road, you ain't got no brains nohow/ You went years without me, might as well keep goin' now" falls a manifesto of sorts: "I'm not sorry for nothing I've done/ I'm glad I fight, I only wish we'd won." By the end, the topical is slowly submerged as the timeless closes over our heads.

It's seductive stuff, at moments as compelling as anything Dylan has ever done. And yet I find myself resisting. Something is missing, as it was in "Time Out of Mind": the irony Dylan once used to undercut his romanticism and his I-am-America self-importance -- and not least to befuddle the audience that had taken his latest posture too literally. Since you can't get away from yourself, not really, at some point you have to come to terms with that or become delusional.

In post-Sept. 11 America, the inescapably topical is also enveloped in history and myth. In the gap where the towers used to be rise many ghosts: of our Cold War alliance with the Afghan mujahedin, the Gulf War, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Iranian hostage crisis, Vietnam, the Israeli-Arab War of '67, World War II, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, World War I, the Civil War, the American Revolution, and beyond, back before the New World, the New Eden, was envisioned. The American imagination will be taxed with demands for unquestioning unity and generic patriotism, will be burdened or inspired by our sense of loss and defiance, identification and separateness, new tensions between individual and collective. And irony (which in some quarters has been prematurely pronounced dead) will be very, very important. The Dylan line that suits does not appear on this album. Better to go back to the beginning, to "Talking World War III Blues" with its teasing ode to mutual paranoia: "I'll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours." Like the Woody Guthrie songs that were its inspiration, it shamelessly appropriates traditional form for contemporary purpose, and its coda is "I said that!" with the accent on the "I." You can't get any more mythically American than that.

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