Ravelstein (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) [Paperback]

Saul Bellow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001 | Series: Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

As always, the author is lavish with physical detail, bringing not only his star but a large gallery of minor players to rude and resounding life ("Rahkmiel was a non-benevolent Santa Claus, a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed"). His sympathies are also stretched in some interesting directions by his homosexual protagonist. Bellow hasn't, to be sure, transformed himself into an affirmative-action novelist. But his famously capacious view of human nature has been enriched by this additional wrinkle: "In art you become familiar with due process. You can't simply write people off or send them to hell." A world-class portrait, a piercing intimation of mortality, Ravelstein is truly that other distinguished thing: a great novel. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Age does not wither Saul Bellow. The 84-year-old writer's new novel is echt Bellow--the grab-bag paragraphs stuffed with truculent observations; the comedic mix of admiration and rivalry that subtends the friendships of intellectual men; the impossible and possible wives. Abe Ravelstein, a professor at a well-known Midwestern college, is obviously modeled on the late Allan Bloom. To clinch the identification, Bellow's narrator, Chick, a writer 20 years older than Ravelstein, uses phrases to describe Ravelstein that are almost identical to phrases Bellow used about Bloom in his published eulogy. Like Bloom, Ravelstein operates his phone like a "command post," getting information from his former students in high positions in various governments. Like Bloom, Ravelstein writes a bestseller using his special brand of political philosophy to comment on American failings. And like Bloom, Ravelstein throws money around as if "from the rear end of an express train." In fact, Chick is so obsessed with the price of Ravelstein's possessions that at times the work reads like a garage sale of his student's effects. Ravelstein also spends lavishly on his boyfriend, Nikki, a princely young Singaporean. Chick's wife, at the beginning of the memoir, is Vela, an East European physicist. Ravelstein dislikes her, and suspects that her Balkan friends are anti-Semites. Eventually, Vela kicks Chick out of his house and divorces him (fans will not be surprised that Bellow, as seems to be his habit, makes this a thinly veiled attack on his ex-wife). Chick ends up marrying one of Ravelstein's students, Rosamund. When Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS, Chick mulls over his obligation to write a memoir of his friend, but he is blocked until he himself suffers a threatening illness. Chick's alternate na?vet? and subconscious rivalry with Ravelstein is the subtext here. Amply rewarding, this late work from the Nobel laureate flourishes his inimitable linguistic virtuosity, combining intimations of mortality with gossipy tattle in a biting and enlightening narrative. First serial to the New Yorker. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 233 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141001763
• ISBN-13: 978-0141001760
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (117 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #776,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel HUMBOLDT'S GIFT in 1975, and in 1976 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 'for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.' He is the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards, for THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, HERZOG, and MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Bellow But Maybe Even Better, July 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Ravelstein (Hardcover)

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.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine obituary to a friend, May 19, 2000

By 

Walker E. Rowe III "Walker Elliott Rowe" (Santiago, CHILE) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ravelstein (Hardcover)

Ravelstein, or rather Bloom, is finely eulogized by Saul Bellow in this short novel. As a corporate cubicle prisoner, I myself wish I could live the literary life--the best I can hope for is to read about such people and to read all the literature I possibly can. Alan Bloom's life seems--as it was depicted in a excerpts of "Ravelstein" published in The New Yorker--seems similar to the life of Robert Hughes also eulogized in "The New Yorker". Both were gay intellectuals whose telephone rang day and night with international calls seeking a bit of well-informed analysis.

Of course, having just read "Ravelstein" I have jumped into "The Closing of the American" mind. But I am puzzled by Saul Bellow's introduction. He says that Moses Herzog, of the novel "Herzog" tries to learn about life by reading the great books. But Saul Bellow says you learn about life by living it--not by reading about it. But isn't the theme of Bloom's essays that such readin gives us a continuum of societies fables and tales and a moral foundation with which we can understand life's issues and the personalities that we meet. Seems the two ideas don't mesh.

I think the Saul Bellow must be trying to sooth his damaged heart by writing about his bitter marriage to the character Elva's real life equal, Bellow's mathematician wife. It is good that his friend Ravelstein (Bloom) is there to help Chick (Bellow) understand what a really cruel woman she is. Chick seems able to discern such matters. Martial discord and the pain thereof also is the major theme of "Herzog". In a way it is good that Bellow has had such tormenting affairs, otherwise we would not have received such wonderful literature.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Death Defying Performance, May 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Ravelstein (Hardcover)

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.