Ravelstein

Rating:
Summary: A splashy finale?
Review: Could we just pump some Ponce de Leon revitalizing fluid into Bellow's bloodstream and keep him writing forever? With even more panache than ever, the 20th (and 2lst?) century's most masterly American novelist richly evokes the complicated interplay of ego and brilliance of life in the upper echelons of Academia, with, once again, a central cerebral Jewish character who is as fascinating to Bellow's goy readers as to his credal peers. Bravo! Maestro. Encore! Encore!

Rating:
Summary: Voidful?
Review: is a kind of literary joke that Ravelstein might have appreciated. The fact that I have placed a question mark beside it reflects the transition of views that I have had with this novel. At first reading, 'Ravelstein' is quite irritating. There are all those repetitions with jar on the nerves. They look as though Bellow's editor was too nervous of his literary reputation to indulge on a necessary cull. They jar, unlike the repetitions in Alistair MacLeod's 'No Great Mischief', which are as comfortable as a chorus and are reflective of that latter novel's grounding in oral history.

But there is an oral element to 'Ravelstein' too. Here, however, the storyteller is all too human, the lapses in memory forming part of his story. At times, it seems as though the anecdotes which the narrator relates or refers to are more fascinating than the stated purpose of the novel: to provide a portrait of the political philosopher Ravelstein. The novel begins with a reference to the Scopes Monkey Trial. Unless you're well up on your American legal history, the significance of this humorous episode may well pass you by. Yet this novel cannot help but be about ideas, given the nature of its subject. The State of Tennessee objected to the teaching of Darwinism on religious grounds, a decision that now seems risible. As Ravelstein lies dying however, his thoughts turn more to Jerusalem and the Holocaust. Darwinism had no more twisted a disciple than Adolph Hitler. No wonder Ravelstein laments the priority given to technical education in the States over and above the Arts. Not that the Arts were free of Nazi propagandists, as the narrator conveys by discussing Celine.

The narrator is Chick, one of Ravelstein's few confidants (although Ravelstein does have a whole troupe of ex-students with whom he can gossip). Ravelstein asks Chick to write a memoir of his life after he has gone. In this regard, 'Ravelstein' could be seen as a failure. If Ravelstein really is meant to be a portrait of Bellow's late friend, Allan Bloom, then surely the whole purpose of the exercise is defeated if Bellow can only compose it as fiction? It seems that all the effort has gone to waste. But then critical commentators have had no difficulty identifying the hero as Bloom, so maybe the decision to fictionalise his life was correct. Perhaps it is most fitting that Bloom's life should be reflected in a work of art. Unfortunately, I have never studied Bloom's ideas, so I might well have missed out on Bellow's memoir if it had not been presented as a work of fiction.

Sometimes, it does seem as though this novel is more about Chick than Ravelstein. There are long sections where Ravelstein is not physically present, most obviously when he has died. You do wonder why Chick continues his account, covering his own life threatening illness, where the links to Ravelstein seem tenuous to say the least. Okay, so both Chick and his young wife knew Ravelstein, but do we really need to see the aftermath of their tropical holiday? At times, it seems as though Chick's voice is held in check by theory: you know, the impossibility of objectively giving an account of another human being's life, the sort of approach which so stilts A. S. Byatt's 'The Biographer's Tale'. However, there is a telling moment where Chick relates that he could only approach the life of someone like Ravelstein piecemeal, with hints of pictures and tippets of conversation. And that's how I came to like this novel, by reading it piecemeal; by dividing the book up into the bits I liked best (of which there were surprisingly many, considering my initial reservations about this novel). Ravelstein liked the vaudeville tradition, the revelation of bawdy truths, the snappiness of critical insight rather than the Freudian liberal soul-searching that I'm admittedly more comfortable with.

Ravelstein seems most comfortable with the Greek theorists. Chick discusses Ravelstein's ideas with reference to Plato's Symposium, the notion that to "be human was to be severed, mutilated... The work of humankind in its severed state is to seek to missing half", with the coital embrace as just a temporary relief from this severed state. However, the way in which the body is mutilated affects its state of mind, Chick seems to be saying. It could be that the repetitions that seem to mar this novel are simply reflections of a mind ravaged by disease. Certainly one symptom of the cigua toxin which Chick ingests is for the patient to become circumlocutory in speech. This may also be why Chick is forced to recount his own illness, since his state of mind is very much reflected in his narrative. His own close call with death also provides the catalyst, the creative spark he needs to infuse his memoir of Ravelstein.

There are moments when Bellow seems obsessed with the vulgarities of fame. Ravelstein seems drawn to cod celebrities like a magnet. Ravelstein seems both fascinated and appalled by popular culture. 'Ravelstein' the novel does not make easy reading at first, but it does become more rewarding when you return to it. Bellow's 'pictures' certainly tend to stay in the mind a long while, and certain phrases resound. If his portrait of Ravelstein does seem a little fuzzy at the edges, then it's because Bellow's left room for the reader's own imagination to fill in the gaps. Maybe Ravelstein the fiction will outlive both Bloom and Bellow after all.

Rating:
Summary: Unnecessary
Review: A book that covers everything about Bloom, except for what made him interesting: his ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Unraveled Ravelstein
Review: Perhaps I came to this novella in the wrong spirit. I have admired Alan Bloom--here thinly disguised as Abe Ravelstein--for many years: preferred his translations, went to hear him when he came to town, appropriated his views from time to time, tediously lectured my family at table from Closing of the American Mind. Hence, having been seduced by the rolling waves of publicity that preceded publication--and untroubled by the AIDS/outing question--I took up the book to make a closer acquaintance with a great man. I suppose I should have waited for the biography. By now it has become commonplace to observe that the strongest portions of this book are in the reminiscences of Bellow's alter ego, Chick, on the Ravelsteinian largeness--of being, character, appetite, intellect. The weakest, occupying some two-thirds of the narrative, are Bellow's maundering complaints about Chick's love life. For me, these passages all too often conjured the troubling image of the octogenarian author first as puzzled cuckold, then as shameless lecher, slavering over--and a'wooing as he slavers--his young female assistant. Feh! This fatal imbalance of unappealing to appealing material made for a disjointed, almost wholly unsatisfying reading experience. Although Ravelstein is not without traces of the Bellovian wit and penetrating observation, it really must be said that this work is but mere scratchings compared to Bellow's major fiction. Ordinarily, I would say, "Bad Bellow (or Roth, e.g.) is better than good almost Anyone Else." Not here. If you must, read the first third, then put this book down...in favor of something by Bloom himself.

Rating:
Summary: good in parts, but disappointing overall
Review: I've always liked Bellow's books. I did enjoy the first half or so of Ravelstein who appears bigger than life. I think the best scene in the book is right after he buys his Lanvin jacket for $4500 in Paris and immediately spills expresso all over it. Rather than being horrified, he finds it kind of funny, much to the narrator's chagrin. The characterization of Ravelstein is excellent and quite funny in parts, but once they leave Paris and return to the midwest, things drag a bit. The book is not heavy on plot to begin with, but the second half is mostly the recounting of various illnesses. There are too many random academic tirades, too many inserted scenes and too many unconnected events to make this is a great novel. Still, Bellow is very "on" in parts and nails his recreation of Harold Bloom on the head. Worth reading, but ultimately, not one of Bellow's very best.

Rating:
Summary: A hilarious exploration of life, friendship and culture
Review: Ravelstein displays Bellow's gift for brilliant description and humor to create a powerful exploration of the art of friendship while visiting some of the greatest ideas of Western culture. Following Schiller's maxim "Live with your century, but do not be its creature," Bellow writes with critical wit about contemporary culture and its impact upon the most human, timeless human vocations of friendship and the quest for knowledge. Highly recommended to everyone.

Rating:
Summary: No there, here
Review: My favorite Bellow remains SEIZE THE DAY. Unconsciously, Bellow used the ancient aesthetic of the "three unities" in this early novel. The "three unities" were unity of place (one location), time (the action takes place on a single day), and action (all events contribute to the denoument.)

Seize the Day is about one character (Tommy Wilhelm): it takes place in a single day on the upper west side of Manhattan. All events lead to his doom. But as Bellow became successful he neglected structure.

In Ravelstein, there is no there, here. Although its protagonist is Ravelstein/Allan Bloom, the most interesting part of the book recounts Bellow's own sufferings as a result of eating tainted fish. The action ranges widely over time and place for Ravelstein dies in the early 1990s, whereas the writing and the illness take place at the end of the century, and it is for us to decide if Ravelstein's demise has anything to do with Bellow's illness.. The place ranges from Chicago to Paris.

A novel is not a classic drama; that is not my point. But Bellow, even at this late date, needs more structuring principles in his books, which may not even be "novels."

What, exactly, constitutes a novel?

The novel came into its own with the rise of the bourgeois of the 19th century. Classic novels can be analysed by using political philosophy: John Rawls' 1972 A Theory of Justice. Rawls departed and continues to depart from today's wisdom which makes the market the adjudicator of justice. His test is instead what we would choose if we did not know our position in society (an oversimplification for brevity.)

The application of Rawls to the 19th century novel is that the point of Dickens et al. was in the continuity of personality over social viscissitudes. We don't want to know about Dickens' characters' Bleak Houses, but about their souls. We care about economic changes as they affect the characters in Dickens and Zola because we care about souls, the precipitate after social difference goes away.

The audience for Dickens and Zola was diverse. The middle class of the 19th century had lives of social mobility and struggle as they themselves tried to survive. They could therefore connect to misadventures in novels. Dickens and Zola also appealed to a variety of social classes, again because of the mobility of their characters.

Whereas in modern American fiction economic place is definitional and for the most part unchanging as an engine of the plot. Stephen King readers want to read about lower-middle class people. Bellow's readers want a high-class Stephen King, in which the high-class reader is reassured by products (such as original instruments CDs) which code the milieu described, in the same way that monsters in the K Mart both comfort and titillate the reader of Stephen King.

Ravelstein enters with a fatal disease and wealthy as the result of publishing a book and Bellow seems to want to show how a free man dies. Ravelstein's change, from health to sickness and debt to wealth, is only prologue.

Chick/Bellow likewise, as a result of his health insurance and financial success, as well as the ministrations of his nth wife Rosamund, is able to survive a normally fatal case of food poisoning.

How nice for them, we think, but how does this concern us?

What we do not see is how these characters, from Tommy Wilhelm to Ravelstein to Chick, would react to changes, and the externals of tenure, money and health insurance are givens.

This does not constitute a novel in the 19th century sense, when novels appealed to many different social classes because their authors had an eye for many different ways of life.

Bellow has no such eye. In Bellow, the University of Chicago is the only clean, well-lit, place, surrounded by jungle boogie from which "the cops" (those fonts of wisdom) warn the eggheads away.

This is an ethical/aesthetic decline from older American fiction, similar to the decline from the time of Virgil in Roman literature to that of Trimalchio.

We care about Frank Norris' repulsive McTeague as he loses his profession, wins (with his wife) the lottery, steals the loot, and ends up in Death Valley. But it's clear that the interesting fact about Ravelstein is that he's "free" in the economic sense and highly intelligent. Silas Lapham was brought to you by Silas Lapham: Ravelstein is brought to you by Bear Stearns and other keepers of his credit. Hamlet practically writes Hamlet, according to a different Bloom: Ravelstein is written by Morgan Stanley.

We follow Aeneas through his adventures, primarily the Dido nonsense, because we care about Aeneas, not his position in Troy or in Rome. But the ONLY interesting thing about Trimalchio is that he gives his friends a feast. We would not care to follow Trimalchio were he to be taken by pirates or convert to Christianity because we don't like him very much. We would not care to follow Ravelstein into a deathbed conversion to born-again Christianity for the same reason.

Modern American fiction is anti-Rawls, and locates character in external fortune. This may be why "unsuccessful" Americans are unable to cohently narrate their day, let alone their lives. In the writings of the unspeakable Tom Wolfe the character becomes the Turnbull and Asser shirt. Lifestyles and the market replace souls, and gone is the capacity, outside the market, for laughter and surprise.

Craft is also disappearing, replaced by smirks: vast zones of Chicago are replaced by their racial coding, received secondhand from the cops (those fonts of wisdom.)

Even the details are off. On the next to last page of the book, Ravelstein is obviously listening to Giacomo Rossini, unaccountably described as played on original 17th-century instruments when Rossini worked in the 19th century. More generally, no real link is made between Ravelstein's death and Bellow's sufferings, although the latter are described grippingly. There is no there, here, only the market.

Rating:
Summary: I remember
Review: As a student at The University of Chicago in the 1970's this book brought back fond, and accurate memories of the late Allan Bloom. Bellow does a great job of capturing the force of Bloom's personality, his cult following, his eccentric nature, and his incredible intellect. The book inspires me to re read Bloom's best selling, "The closing of the American mind." Bellow succeeds then, he not only honors his friend, but does exactly what Bloom would have wanted -- calling those of us who were his students back, and inspiring us to keep learning.

Rating:
Summary: Portrait of a True Original
Review: This fictionalized portrait of Bellow's friend Allan Bloom captures a brilliant, eccentric, unpredictable "public intellectual" in his last days. Pundits on the right and the left tried to pigeonhole him, but Bloom remained his own person to the end, and inspired Bellow to write his best book in years.

Rating:
Summary: YIN exploits YANG
Review: Imagine for a moment a world populated by Saul Bellow(Chick) clones with think alike wonderful brains. Now...Take a deep breath... We would all be motionless observers and super refined "Yin" type critics of anything and everything that moves, or tries to produce any amount of "Yang" energy. Unfortunately, how can we all make a living writing about nervous little barbed TV artists, powerful bald heads destroyed by excessive sex, overzealous, restless, overdevoted wives ...if they're all now inexistant !