Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Often the dying become extremely severe. We will still be here when they're gone and it's not easy for them to forgive us."

Finally I have begun to fill a huge gap in my Great American Literature education: I have just read my first novel by Saul Bellow - Ravelstein (2000). What a great read it has been! True, the first 20 or so pages are highly intimidating: the author assumes the reader's erudition and complete focus, and the text almost overwhelms with hyper-intellectualism. But having survived the beginning pages many readers should get accustomed to the challenges of the prose, like I did. However, I need to offer a warning: this novel may be better understood by older people, and by 'older' I mean people for whom death is no longer an abstract concept but a conspicuous event on the horizon.

The narrator, known as Chick, a seventy-something writer, is obviously an alter ego of Mr. Bellow himself (the author was in fact 85 when the novel was published). Professor Ravelstein, for whom Chick is the closest friend, is "a major figure in the highest intellectual circles," an internationally renowned professor of philosophy, and the author of a best-selling book that expounds his conservative views about the decline of American culture. The book made millions for Prof. Ravelstein and now he can afford flying to Paris to buy Lanvin jackets and custom-made silk shirts. He also happens to be gay and suffers from AIDS complications. He wants Chick to write his memoirs.

In his writings Professor Ravelstein captures "modernity in its full complexity" and the human costs of modernity. He criticizes the mass-market aspect of cultural modernity and juxtaposes it with culture of the olden days, writing about people who read "Stendhal's novels or Thomas Hardy's poems", instead of sucking garbage flowing from TV, Facebook or Twitter. He recommends interest in Plato and Thucidides rather than current celebrities:

"I like to say when I am asked about Finnegan[s Wake], that I am saving him for the nursing home. Better to enter eternity with Anna Livia Plurabelle than with the Simpsons jittering on the TV screen."

Particularly sharp is Ravelstein's critique of the modern education system and the fact that the "liberal education had shrunk to the vanishing point." The universities are excellent in sciences and engineering but a failure at liberal arts. At this point I realized that Mr. Bellow's Ravelstein is modeled on the real-life philosopher and classicist, Allan Bloom. And indeed I have found out that the author and Dr. Bloom were friends and colleagues at the University of Chicago. The life story of Ravelstein and that of Dr. Bloom are in fact parallel. Yet let us remember: this is a novel, not any kind of Dr. Bloom's biography. By it being beautifully written fiction I find the novel much more realistic than any non-fiction biography could be.

Scattered throughout the novel are wonderful morsels of truth about human life and especially death. We the geezers will appreciate the mention of one of the main problems of aging - "speeding up of time." We the geezers may also be able to understand the sentence I quoted in the epigraph above. It's a hard truth to swallow and very painful. Ravelstein is a great novel. My "to read" shelves will now gather other Bellow's works.

Four and three quarter stars.

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