Ravelstein

Rating:
Summary: AN EXQUISITE ODE TO A FRIEND BELLOW CLEARLY LOVED
Review: I'm generally smitten by Bellow's almost effortless command of language. This thinly-veiled memoir based around an actual friend's life -- Allan Bloom, a professor at Chicago who died young -- doesn't disappoint on any count you can expect from a classy piece of writing.

A richly textured brush that looks at humanity, love, relationships has been a Bellow forte since I've known his work ("Something to remember me by" being my personal all time favorite) and in the case of this novel his passions coincide with his friend's. Several events that are known to have occured in reality are chronicled with the typical Bellow flair.

A couple of minor caveats before you set out...

One, for long stretches of the novel, Bellow relies on the reflected glory of his and Bloom's real-life fame to lend the novel light and heat...a somewhat tricky strategy that is occasionally a let down.

Second, the last one-third of the book (after Ravelstein, Bloom's character and the eponymous protagonist, passes away) is a little self-indulgent and slow paced while we are basically left with Chick's (Bellow's) ruminations about all and sundry.

Still, I recommend these 233 pages as a decent summer read. If you read Bellow for plot twists and cliff hanger suspense, you are reading the wrong guy anyway. What makes this book or any of his other works tick is his simple yet deeply moving looks at the biology of our lives and relationships under the prying lens of a writer who redefined the turn of a phrase.

Rating:
Summary: Rich comic detail of characters and a friendship
Review: It is great to read Saul Bellow's longer fiction again! To me its unimportant how fictional it is, (Ravelstein is a thinly disguised version of Bellows' University of Chicago Colleague Allan Bloom). Recall that Bellow's Humboldts' Gift was partly based on Delmore Schwartz. Perhaps fictionalizing, allow Bellow more freedom, or perhaps allow him to get beyond a writers block of a true biography. Ravelstein's surprising best seller, (like Blooms The Closing of the American Mind), presents his ideas .. who he is. Ravelstein is a man who "lived by his ideals", and directed them toward a circle of friends and colleagues.

What Ravelstein (the man and the book) is about is friendship ..that spans the passage of time, life and marriages. This is also a tale of the power of a strong personalty ("a character") on those around, and a man using his intelligence on his friends, colleagues, and tangentially on himself. There are rich details on character and comic detail, that no one does better than Bellow!

Rating:
Summary: Not Bellow's Best
Review: Near the end of this novel the narrator, Chick, life-long friend of Ravelstein (presumably Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago), describes a serious episode of heart failure. These pages are remarkably well-done, but like much of this novel, it's hard to find much on Ravelstein in these pages. Mr. Bellow somewhere in effect admits that his medical problems may be a bit of a departure from the main story line. Fair enough. Unfortunately, the story is a rambling set of recollections; it is difficult to discard anything, and just about everything is fair game in this novel that manages, despite its inclusiveness, to give short shirft to its central character, Ravelstein. When we do meet him, we find precious little exceptional. His materialism is right out of the GQ "central casting" department. We're assured he studied the classics, but when is beyond me, given his propensity to shop. If you want to know about Professor Bloom, you would do much better going directly to the source, particularly his translation of Plato's Republic. You won't learn much about Bloom's apparent weakness for tailored, crisply laundered (wrapped, not on hangers, Bellow assures us) shirts, but you'll get much closer than Ravelstein can bring you to understanding his exceptional mind.