Ravelstein

Dying of AIDS, internationally renowned professor, Abe Ravelstein commissions his friend, Chick, to write his biography in the form of a memoir.A bold and brash novel, Ravelstein is reminiscent of Humboldt's Gift; each contains an admiring narrator and each is based on actual persons in Bellow's life.Ravelstein, however, is more of an extravert than is Humboldt, becoming almost a comic figure who lives the high life on a grand and glorious scale. He tosses his hand-tailored clothes about with abandon, orders lavish meals, and in general, has a passion for material possessions while maintaining an utter disdain for money.Ravelstein is certainly a far cry from the dour figures that usually people Bellow's novels; in fact he is just the opposite: flamboyant, perverse, bizarre, passionate and material. Considering what fate has in store for him, perhaps his personality simply adds to the overall tragedy of the novel.The other characters in Ravelstein are vintage Bellow. The men are removed academics, the women devouring and unreasonable.It is Chick, however, who comes to dominate the book. A big-city, Jewish type, he is still unprepared for his disastrous marriage to Vela, a stereotypical Bellow female straight out of Herzog. His second marriage, however, to Rosamund, one of Ravelstein's former students is more successful, but since Bellow seems averse to giving us anything resembling a fulfilling relationship and a sympathetic female character, Rosamund remains little more than background music.Fighting demons of his own, Chick decides to escape the pessimism surrounding Ravelstein and leaves the gloomy Chicago winter for the sunnier climes of the Caribbean where he comes face to face with his own mortality.If one accepts Herzog as the benchmark against which to weigh Bellow's work, then Ravelstein succeeds. The characters are, for the most part, larger-than-life, the mood is sufficiently pessimistic and the setting depicted with meticulously accurate details. The thing Ravelstein lacks are the cast of secondary figures and the braided running subplots. This is, however, not a criticism, and Ravelstein is all the better for its clean and crisp narrative.Ravelstein is, at its heart, vintage Bellow, and it shows us that this master writer has lost none of his power to observe life with both sympathy and cool irony. If anything, he is even better than before.

Have a look at the wonderful article in the New York Times, Sunday, May 28, 2000, in the Arts & Leisure Section. (I believe you can search for it at the www.nytimes.com website.) "Ravelstein Knows Everything, Almost", by Michael Beckerman, discusses the lacunae in Ravelstein's musical education. Evidently there are a couple of wonderful musical anachronisms (or historical mistakes) which found their way into the book. Who made the mistakes? Is it Bellow, is it the narrator, or is it Ravelstein who is in error? There's also a particularly clever discussion of the book's title.All of which is to say: a book any less deserving than Ravelstein would not enjoy or deserve this kind of attention, or this quality of criticism. The book, in my opinion, is one of Bellow's best in many years, far outshining the recent novellas. In many ways, it is worth comparison to Herzog and Humboldt's Gift. Ravelstein is not for everyone, mind you -- if you are too interested in plot, for example, or easily bored by lofty prose. And give up on all that criticism of Bellow, his serial uxoriousness, his exploitation of a friend's life, etc. Bellow does not spare himself any criticism, either; why do the critics always fail to mention that?A propos of Ravelstein's intermittent lapses: I was surprised that, while dining in the restaurant Lucas-Carton, at the Place de la Madeleine in Paris, Ravelstein failed to note that the interior is a famous Art Nouvelle near-masterpiece by Majorelle. How could that have escaped his attention, commenting, as he did, on every other aspect of the meal? Ravelstein is very nearly a great book, and one that I look forward to reading again.

By now, most of those who are thinking about reading this book already know that the character of Abe Ravelstein is based on Bellow's friend Allan Bloom, and, that Chick serves as a persona for Bellow himself. Chick's approach to Ravelstein is described as a "piecemeal method": the provision of an ever-expanding accumulation of interactions between and among the most important people in Ravelstein's life as well as their interactions with Ravelstein himself. We learn that Ravelstein asked Chick to write a biography of him in the form of a memoir. Chick concentrates on countless memories of his friend. He and Ravelstein take turns being the focal point of the narrative. There is very little physical action...but a great deal of intellectual and emotional activity, especially as Ravelstein's health deteriorates. (He is dying of AIDS.) If you share my high regard for Bellow's previous works, this is a "must read." Other reviewers have referred to Oates's Blonde as "pathography" and the same can be said of Ravelstein. At which point does it cease to be a biography (or memoir) and becomes a novel? I couldn't care less. This may not be Bellow's finest work but I would be hard-pressed to suggest another which has greater intellectual depth and richer emotional texture.

I've been a life-long Bellow fan, so it's hard for me to be objective about Ravelstein. If you are interested in the big human issues - love, death, meaning, how to greet one's own end, mankind's humanity, lack thereof, men and women, marriage, ego, the politics of academia, the direction of culture, and some specifically Jewish questions having to do with one's place in the scheme of human and cosmic existence, then you will plow through this plotless poetic masterwork and be amazed at how square in the eye an eighty-five year old artist can look death, and life. You will come away from Ravelstein appreciating how all of us must deal with the ultimate fate. Roman a clef or no, the book goes well beyond commemoration of an intellectual hero, reasserting all of the themes Bellow has so elequently embraced for so many seekers - asking what it means to be here, on earth, human, awake, for so brief and incredible a voyage as that which a thinking, alert person is willing to experience. How do we contend with our own mortality? our sins? our omissions? the desire to quell the pain? who will remember us? what will it have meant? Bellow answers these questions, this time, in less than 235 pages, with hardly a moment's digression, in a sensational mind-boggling read. You will find yourself asking, How is it that nothing is happening and I want to know everything he has to say! How does a great story teller turn dying into a page turner? a pot boiler? He never patronizes, never compromises, always goes for the heart, and soul, of the human experience. Ravelstein is Bellow purified - deceptively simple, enlivening and heartening, tender at last. You won't forget Ravelstein, and in accomplishing this, Bellow affirms that there is something quite worthy in the human experience, no matter how painful, horrific, mindless, or pleasing the particulars may be.

I picked up "Ravelstein" more as a fan of Allan Bloom than of Saul Bellow, though I'm a great admirer and reader of both. Ever since I read Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," (and Bellow's preface therein) my life has somehow not been the same, perhaps a bit off. I found myself wishing I had read it in my freshman year, not my senior year, when it was too late to tear into certain professors. I was a bit of an ingenue until I read this book, you could say.In any case, Allan Bloom is, of course, the man behind the paper-thin mask of Abe Ravelstein himself. He created quite a stir in the late eighties with his controversial, brilliant, and lucrative book, and Bellow, Bloom's dear friend, draws attention to this phenomenon in the novel, ex post facto. "Ravelstein" is a small volume of snapshots from Bellow's memory of Bloom, and bears some resemblance to the other biographies or eulogies that Bellow mentions: Boswell and Macaulay on Samuel Johnson, Eckermann on Goethe, etc. I am still trying to absorb the meaning of the book, having read it, as Bellow read Macaulay, in a "purple fever."The book is excellent on its own merits - sad and beautiful - but will of course be especially rewarding to those very familiar with the ideas that preoccupied Allan Bloom and his great teacher Leo Strauss (referred to in the text as the famous "Davarr") during the last half-century. One gets an insider's view of the private life of a man as compared to his published thoughts and sentiments. Though Ravelstein is a bit of a terror at first glance - everything is done in high volume from Marlboro cigarettes to Rossini operas - one begins to see the continuity between his (Bloom's) work on "Love and Friendship" and his own vibrant life. I was curious if the conversations between Ravelstein and his lover Nikki (which we don't overhear) would bear any resemblance to the ones between Falstaff and Prince Hal in Henry IV.Ravelstein-Bloom's detractors will find no fresh fodder to claw at here, though the candor to be found is sometimes astonishingly personal. Those best suited for this book will seek out characters that mix a gift for telling the lowest, bawdiest jokes with a longing for the highest, most beautiful things in life and literature.