  Absolutely continuous commuting row contractions admit a weak-$*$ continuous
functional calculus. Building on recent work describing the first and second
dual spaces of the closure of the polynomial multipliers on the Drury-Arveson
space, we give a complete characterization of these commuting row contractions
in measure theoretic terms. We also establish that completely non-unitary row
contractions are necessarily absolutely continuous, in direct parallel with the
case of a single contraction. Finally, we consider refinements of this question
for row contractions that are annihilated by a given ideal.
