Customer Reviews

Ravelstein

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To those interested in the subject of this novel (the late political philosopher Allan Bloom) it is most interesting as an illustration of what Bloom would have called (from Plato's Republic) "the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry". I think the purpose of the book (conscious or not) is to suggest that, while the novel's protagonist turned to political philosophy primarily to understand love and death, philosophy did not enable him to understand either one as well as Bellow can in his capacity as a novelist.

Chick's wife Vela is a foil to Bloom ("Ravelstein"). They are both scientists, she natural, he a political philosopher. Both despise natural beauty (trees birds etc.) in favor of their respective studies. But she ignores politics for chaos physics, while Bloom is engaged in what Bellow refers to as a higher duty (we can be assured Bloom did not regard it as a mere duty): the study of man. Both are voluptuous, but Bloom's tastes are informed by a broad view of history and he is not so vain as she. She is dumb about people whereas Bloom is constantly looking at human affairs with all his learning and the perspective it gives and making definitive pronouncements, which Bellow ostensibly does not quarrel with. In fact, Ravelstein ought to be the solution to the problem Bellow has so long struggled with: how to bring the reason of a scholar to bear upon the problems of real human life.

But Bellow sells Bloom short along with the tradition Bloom stood for. In fact, what Bellow describes as an agreement on Bloom's part with Athens and respect for Jerusalem turns, according to Bellow, into an obsession with Jerusalem toward the end of Bloom's life. from the novel, one could say it was under the surface the whole time, and Bloom himself only came to realize his own religious longings when he was about to die. Bloom's science (Socratic philosophy) is supposed to be the highest realization that we cannot live forever, "learning how to die"; but Bellow goes out of his way to suggest that Bloom's attachment to material possessions and people and life belied his supposed perspective on death. His death was unsocratic, and he had to turn to religious concerns despite himself to deal with the pain of leaving the world. Bloom's science, like Vela's, fails to deal with love and death, though it fashions a much more elaborate illusion that it has.

This book illustrates the old maxims about poets. They concentrate on the particular to the exclusion of the general ideas behind particulars. They are also enslaved to opinion. As a man dependent upon an audience, Bellow is proud to appeal to the "wider interest" as he announces on page 6, and so he skims over the rational confrontation with death in philosophy for the task of vindicating the common man's counter-rational attachment to an afterlife. He also admits the incapacity of art to comprehend women and instead flatters his wife (making her out to have a superior understanding of love than Bloom) for flattering him with her attentions when he was sick. Bellow is intrigued by the world and its phenomena and wants to observe them like the philosopher does, but in the end he cannot reconcile this observation with the fact of death and the isolation and vulnerability of the individual in light of death. So he clings to particulars, popular distortions, and love uncritically elevated to supreme status.

This of course is not the character of Bloom's eros in deed or concept. the fact that Bellow is obscuring Bloom's true superiority comes out in that Bellow does not even mention Love and Friendship, which Bloom wrote during the severe illness that eventually killed him. This work of clear philosophic interpretation of Eros ("Athens" over "Jerusalem") eclipses Bellow's views and understandings of the phenomena of love and death. It refutes Bellow's complacent views on human nature, God, and love and puts Bloom in a league that vitiates the very attempt to do what Bellow claims he has done -- show us something important about the Man behind the Ideas.

Bellow mentions that Bloom thinks the "highest function of our species" is love; and that according to Plato living by Nature or Eros is a strong life compared to a weak modern life. But he does not say that according to Bloom and Plato natural Eros is for Logos and the strong life is the life of philosophy. The reader is not even let in on the fact that the dispute is between this (here undeveloped) robust foundation of philosophy and poetry: no connection is made between Bloom's philosophy and his eros, they are made in fact to seem like accidental conjunctions or even incompatible aspects of his character, and so cannot stand up to the challenge of the common appeal of Bellow's compromising position. Bellow manipulates our view of Bloom to make the wishy-washy appear more satisfying than the "hard" insight of Bloom into the human condition. In this novel, poetry seems to win the "old quarrel", but readers should be aware that it does so only by obscuring the facts of the case at hand.

For the past 50 years, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow has been perfecting the *roman à clef* -- a novel in which real people or actual events are portrayed in fictional disguise. But what should we call a memoir in fictional disguise?

Bellow's latest novel, "Ravelstein," is a thinly fictionalized character sketch of his late friend Allan Bloom, a rakish classical scholar who wrote (at Bellow's suggestion) "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987). But "Ravelstein" -- the "novel" -- is also the story of a relationship between two men: Abe Ravelstein, an intellectual who becomes a best-selling author, and Chick, an older writer who suggested Ravelstein's treatise on human nature and the narrator of this story. Five years after Ravelstein dies of AIDS, Chick faces the consuming task of writing a biography of the complex don, whose outsized appetites for Hermes ties, Armani suits, and Cuban cigars rival his esoteric fascination with Rousseau, Machiavelli and Plato.

Why fictionalize this real-life friendship between two larger-than-life figures in American culture? Only Bellow knows. Fictionalizing the story of Allen Bloom might have allowed Bellow more flexibility with an intricate, humanly inconsistent subject. Or it might simply have been Bellow's way of exceeding the natural bounds of novel structure. To be sure, "Ravelstein" swells with all the irony and artistry with which Bellow has imbued his earlier novels. "Ravelstein" taken *in situ* slides gracefully along it. It will stand among the best *writing* of his long career.

Still, "Ravelstein" is deeper than the words on the page, like a ghostly image seen beneath the surface of water. Bellow blunts the impact of Bloom's character and life by labeling it as fiction. The lesson of a real life retold burns brighter than a memoir masquerading as a fable.

Saul Bellow is apparently one of literature's living legends.

I say "apparently" because I had never read Bellow before the April release of his newest book, "Ravelstein."

Quite frankly, I had never even heard of the author, even though he is considered one of the greats, with titles including "The Actual," "Herzog," and "Dangling Man." I don't even know if those represent Bellow at his finest or his worst.

But "Ravelstein" makes for a good introduction, even if it is the author's means of saying goodbye.

"Ravelstein" is Bellow's tribute to his friend, the late Allan Bloom, a political philosopher and author of "Closing of the American Mind" and "Shakespeare's Politics."

Bellowsian narrator Chick recounts recalls his friendship with Bloom prototype Abe Ravelstein, brilliant political professor and bestselling author of a book about the ideas sustaining or killing humankind.

"Ravelstein" is low on plot, but heavy with character development- it's the little things that count.

We are witness to Ravelstein's opinions on Plato, Caesar, homosexuality, love, friendship, history, vaudeville and a host of others.

These conversations and discussions are presented by Bellow in an amiable manner; it is as if the reader is seated one table over in the restaurants or listening through hotel room walls as Chick and Abe sit back and chat.

Things take a downward spiral as the book enters "Tuesdays with Morrie" territory when Ravelstein contracts AIDS. We are witnesses again, this time to Abe's final days and Chick's battle with his own mortality as he mourns his friend.

The book falters after Ravelstein's passing and Chick and his wife Rosamund travel to the Caribbean to escape Chick's ensuing depression. When Chick contracts a possibly fatal illness, his struggle to stay alive doesn't actually hurt the book, but doesn't add anything either.

Things are frenetic and feverish towards the end, but Bellow added more to the book when leaving well enough alone might have been better.

Despite a less-than-stellar finish, however, Bellow proves that the literary giant standing he possesses is not a fluke; indeed, if one has never read the author before, "Ravelstein" is a good place to start.

How fortunate we are that Saul Bellow has the courage and adroit capability to perform this act of magic and love: here is a brilliant novel, a stunning biography of a friendship, and a journey through the centuries of dialogue of philosophy and poetry. Bellow is a gifted craftsman with the English language, Given. He understands character development and creates wholly credible players from the most bizarre and challenging gene pool, Given. That he is terse and succinct is well established. So on opening this rather short novel we settle into the knowledge that the journey ahead is secure, that whatever the story unfolding, it will be brilliantly crafted.

The utter joy for me is the fact that Bellow has gifted us on so many levels - fascinating reading, wholly memorable characters, an undercurrent of autobiography and memoirs, and at the same time he addresses the big questions we all face - the importance of love, the world view of our philosopher forbears and contemporaries, death and what follows, and true , that is to say TRUE friendship.

I love this book. I found myself marking certain pages that held memorable crystaline lines, such as "The simplest of human beings is, for that matter, esoteric and radically mysterious." I know I will return to RAVELSTEIN often, probably every time I choose to share it with someone I love.