Ravelstein

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Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Saul Bellow confined himself to shorter fictions. Not that this old master ever dabbled in minimalism: novellas such as The Actual and The Bellarosa Connection are bursting at the seams with wit, plot, and the intellectual equivalent of high fiber. Still, Bellow's readers wondered if he would ever pull another full-sized novel from his hat. With Ravelstein, the author has done just that--and he proves that even in his ninth decade, he can pin a character to the page more vividly, and more permanently, than just about anybody on the planet.

Character is very much the issue in Ravelstein, whose eponymous subject is a thinly disguised version of Bellow's boon companion, the late Allan Bloom. Like Bloom, Abe Ravelstein has spent much of his career at the University of Chicago, fighting a rearguard action against the creeping boobism and vulgarity of American life. What's more, he's written a surprise bestseller (a ringer, of course, for The Closing of the American Mind), which has made him into a millionaire. And finally, he's dying--has died of AIDS, in fact, six years before the opening of the novel. What we're reading, then, is a faux memoir by his best friend and anointed Boswell, a Bellovian body-double named Chick: Ravelstein was willing to lay it all out for me. Now why did he bother to tell me such things, this large Jewish man from Dayton, Ohio? Because it very urgently needed to be said. He was HIV-positive, he was dying of complications from it. Weakened, he became the host of an endless list of infections. Still, he insisted on telling me over and over again what love was--the neediness, the awareness of incompleteness, the longing for wholeness, and how the pains of Eros were joined to the most ecstatic pleasures. Ravelstein is a little thin in the plot department--or more accurately, it has an anti-plot, which consists of Chick's inability to write his memoir. But seldom has a case of writer's block been so supremely productive. The narrator dredges up anecdote after anecdote about his subject, assembling a composite portrait: "In approaching a man like Ravelstein, a piecemeal method is perhaps best." We see this very worldly philosopher teaching, kvetching, eating, drinking, and dying, the last in melancholic increments. His death, and Chick's own brush with what Henry James called "the distinguished thing," give much of the novel a kind of black-crepe coloration. But fortunately, Bellow shares Ravelstein's "Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands," and there can't be many eulogies as funny as this one.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Biographer's December

Ravelstein, the eagerly anticipated new novel from Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, presents an interesting series of dilemmas to the reader. Part fiction, part biography, part autobiography, Ravelstein repeatedly circles around questions of writerly priority, asking whether the author's primary responsibility is to his own life, the life of his subject, or his imagination. Each possibility hides its own pitfalls. The novelist may become more absorbed in his creations than in his own life. The autobiographer runs the risk of self-absorption, of solipsism. The biographer, chronicling another man's life, is doomed to playing second fiddle in his own, at least until the task is done. Discussing his gargantuan biography of Bellow, a project ten years in the making that will be published in the fall of 2000, James Atlas has written: Unlike the novelist, who invents (supposedly) his characters, or the historian, who grapples with a populous cast, the biographer enters into a curious intimacy with the person being written about, a relationship charged with ambivalence, resentment, love, dependency, and all the myriad other emotions that crowd in whenever we allow ourselves to become intimate with another. That the biographer doesn't actually live with, or in many instances even know, his subject; that the relationship may be involuntary (an unauthorized biography); that it's by its very nature unequal, one person focusing attention on another with no hope of reciprocity, in no way diminishes the intensity of the experience. In the early pages of Ravelstein, Chick, the transparently Bellow-like narrator, meditates on this experience, this interconnection of author and subject. Having been asked by his good friend Abe Ravelstein to write his biography, Chick seems decidedly uneasy about the task ahead. "Ravelstein's legacy to me was a subject," he tells us. "He thought he was giving me a subject, perhaps the best one I ever had, perhaps the only really important one. But what such a legacy signified was that he would die before me. If I were to predecease him he would certainly not write a memoir of me." Chick's work throughout Ravelstein is thus two-fold: doing justice to the life of his friend, on the one hand, while doing justice to his own, as well.

The connections of this novel's characters to the dramatis personae of Bellow's own life are too open to avoid mentioning. Chick's portrait of his ex-wife Vela, a brilliant Romanian physicist, is an at times scathing attack on Bellow's estranged fourth wife, Alexandra, a Romanian mathematician. Chick's new wife, Rosamund, a former student of Ravelstein's, bears much in common with Bellow's fifth wife and former student, Janis Freedman. But the largest subject of the novel—and the largest of its real-world connections—is Ravelstein himself. Bellow's portrait of Abe Ravelstein is based on the life of his good friend Allan Bloom, the conservative political philosopher and author of The Closing of the American Mind, who died in 1992 of complications from AIDS. Bellow, through Chick, represents Bloom, through Ravelstein, as a brilliant, eccentric, larger-than-life thinker, a dominant and dominating force among his students and friends, a man whose loss—imminent or accomplished—reverberates throughout the novel. As the last line of the book points out, "You don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death."

But nor do you easily create a sufficient portrait of such a creature. Chick's remembrances repeatedly twist in upon themselves, creating a pretzel-like structure that cannot be wholly unknotted. These remembrances are dotted with expressions of concern that the portrait isn't quite right, that the reader will misunderstand. But the narrator's care, and the involutions of intellectual conversations that begin and end throughout the novel, come together to create, more than anything, the portrait of a friendship and of a biographer mourning the loss of his subject. "In approaching a man like Ravelstein," Chick tells us, "a piecemeal method is perhaps best."

The novel begins in Paris in the springtime, as the two celebrate the success of Ravelstein's book, a book suggested to him by Chick, in which Ravelstein popularized the ideas he'd long been teaching at the University of Chicago. Chick watches in something like awe as Ravelstein sates his enormous appetites—for food, for luxury, for ideas. This moment of revelry, however, gives way to mourning as the two return to the United States, and Chick is at last forced to confront his friend's illness—an illness that is, interestingly, first mentioned in the novel by a third party. Ravelstein's health rapidly fails, and Chick reluctantly begins to see that the biography his friend had asked for may actually need to be written. The closer the two come to facing Ravelstein's mortality, the more Chick notes a shift in their conversations, from a preoccupation with the Greeks to one with the Jews, from Eros to death. Returning yet again to Ravelstein's interest in the Socratic notion of Eros, Chick catches himself: How readily you fall into the present tense when you talk about Ravelstein. And you can't help feeling that it is ridiculous to have a head filled with such notions, given what the times are—what the places are as this stupefying century ends with its wars of attrition, wars of movement, Dachaus, gulags, moonshots, its Hitler, its Stalin—its high-tech planetary transformation streaking into the next millenium. This preoccupation with destruction, with endings, with the crushing devastation of the deaths of millions and the death of one close friend, paralyzes the biographer, who finds himself for several years afterward unable to obtain sufficient purchase on his subject to write the promised biography. The apparent impossibility of fully capturing his relationship to Ravelstein threatens to undo Chick's relationship to his own life. "For me," he tells us, "the challenge of portraying him (what an olden-days' word 'portraying' has become) by and by turned into a burden." Only after Chick's own all-too-close brush with death—based upon Bellow's own near-fatal infection from eating contaminated fish—can he begin to sort through the materials of his friend's life, to create a portrait that acknowledges its own insufficiency. "I would rather see Ravelstein again," he says, at last, "than to explain matters it doesn't help to explain."

In the end, the writer is able to separate himself from his subject only by gesturing toward the lack of necessity in completing that separation. Written in Bellow's matchless style, Ravelstein is finally about the loyalty of friends, the ties that bind the biographer and his subject, and the impossibility of truly detaching the teller from the tale.

—Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is assistant professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.

Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow's new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.

Author Biography: Saul Bellow is the author of twelve novels and numerous novellas and stories. He is the only novelist to receive three National Book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet. In 1975 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt's Gift. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him in 1976. In 1990 Mr. Bellow was presented the National Book Award Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters.

FROM THE CRITICS

Sean McCann - Book-The Magazine for the Reading Life

Bellow clearly wrote Ravelstein as a labor of love. It not only conveys sad truths, it is an example of an unfortunate fact itself-- great admiration does not always make for great art.

Wall Street Journal

... vintage Bellow, funny and human and intelligent."—April 14, 2000

Baltimore Sun

Saul Bellow, a towering figure of American literature, has, at 84, produced a new novel. It is vibrant with life, joy, love — and a brim with wisdom. If proof were needed that great craft need not ebb with age, and that a brilliant mind and courageous heart need never cease growing. The book is concise and the story quite simple. After reading 'Ravelstein,' I found myself believing that Bellow has come, with great and honorable age, to a depth of wisdom, a blissfulness of spirit, a recognition of the dignity and necessity of energy — that liberate him fully to be both wise and celebratory."—April 9, 2000

Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review

No contemporary of ours is more consistently brilliant and more defiantly risky than Saul Bellow.

Boston Globe