Ravelstein
by Saul BellowViking, 233 pp., $24.95
Since Saul Bellow’s latest novel Ravelstein is really more of an extended character sketch than novel, it’s lucky for readers that the title character is fascinating and charismatic. Based on the late thinker Allan Bloom, Abe Ravelstein is charming, exuberant, and opinionated. Once reduced to pawning his trinkets and valuables, the publication of a controversial bestseller (ô la The Closing of the American Mind) has allowed him to indulge his hedonism in a grandiose manner. He wears a $20,000 watch and smokes smuggled Havanas. He buys a $4,500 Lavin jacket and carelessly dumps espresso on it. He bestows lavish gifts on his lover. For all he consumes, Ravelstein gives in equal proportion. He’s a loyal and dedicated instructor, open to mentoring his students and hyperprotective of his friends. He serves as their marriage counselor, philosopher, shrink, and spiritual advisor. A lover of both high and popular culture, he equally enjoys the Chicago Bulls and Bizet’s operas. Unfortunately, when Ravelstein departs from the pages of the book, he almost drains it of life.
Ravelstein does not lack for characters but it barely has any plot to speak of. Most of the story is told as a series of vignettes by Chick, Bellow’s narrator and authorial stand-in. Chick is a novelist nearly 20 years older than Ravelstein but he’s securely tucked under the great man’s wing. The younger man continuously fusses over his elder, even advising Chick to take his wife to synagogue on High Holy Days. The first half of the book could be considered the dialogues of Ravelstein and Chick. The two involve themselves in lofty, intellectual discussions. They window-shop and discuss politics; they discuss neckties and Rousseau. Bellow makes it movingly clear that to some people, the world of ideas is neither abstract nor frivolous.
Fortunately, their insights have the capacity to entertain others because the actual action in the book is related in an offhand manner. We gradually learn that Chick’s marriage to the beautiful and haughty Vela is on the rocks and that Ravelstein wants him to bail out before it’s too late. In fact, Chick seems to spend more time discussing the dynamics of the marriage with Ravelstein than with his wife.
It comes as a bit of a shock to discover that Ravelstein is seriously ill and dying. One wonders if Bellow is suggesting that certain relationships are so intense that it’s difficult to notice the external world surrounding them (Chick himself finds out the extent of his friend’s illness from another acquaintance). Devoted to his friend throughout his illness, Chick agrees to play Boswell to Ravelstein’s Johnson.
Ravelstein may possess little in the way of plot but it’s one of Bellow’s most engaging novels. Clearly it’s a meditation on death but it’s also a moving, nonsentimental treatise on love. Bellow reveals the deep pleasures of confidence, gossip, and banter so vital to intellectual life. It would have been easy to make Ravelstein a cartoon but instead he appears as a character that would have been at home in a work by Chaucer — his vitality and generosity wouldn’t be possible without his excesses. “You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death,” is Bellow’s last line; he has thoroughly depicted how difficult that renunciation can be.
This article appears in July 7 • 2000.