On not getting over it

"When you ain't got nothing," Dylan sings, "you got nothing to lose." Yes, I think. Yes. I suppress the three words that have haunted me my entire adult life—"They'll smear you"—and choose Dylan's instead, composing a carefully worded private e-mail to the editor of The New York Times Book Review, alerting him to his neglect of all four of my published books. He responds graciously with two sentences in which he promises to share this information with his colleagues. Eight months later, the novel remains unreviewed. It's 2013, the day I sit down, with trepidation, to write this. The Times's...