[In the following unfavorable review, Tandon asserts that Ravelstein does not live up to its potential and that the book fails to captivate readers.]

When is a choice not a choice? This is a question which Saul Bellow's fiction has pursued with dedication and ferocity for over half a century. As early as Dangling Man (1944), his perception of the ironies of enforced leisure in a time of military purposefulness—“the derangement of days, the levelling of occasions”—made that novel so much more than the demotic Chicago Camus it could easily have been. And in later works, many with titles which now sound like landmarks in post-war American fiction, he has continued to explore the range of what constitutes human choice, always aware that one cannot avoid being enmeshed with the wills and desires of others, but that there are better or worse ways of dealing with the fact. As Stella says to the protagonist of The Adventures of Augie March, “you and I are the kind of people other people are always trying to fit into their schemes. So suppose we didn't play along, then what?” In this respect, Ravelstein feels like familiar Bellow territory—perhaps rather over-familiar. A meditation on biography and autobiography, the novel allows Bellow to focus on the question of what is most worthy of emphasis among an individual's actions, since “the simplest of human beings is … esoteric and radically mysterious”; but the detailing of that mystery is often diffuse, and eventually comes across as more admirable than enjoyable. Ravelstein is the first Bellow novel since Herzog (1964) to take a character's unadorned name for its title, although the resemblance largely ends there.

Martin Amis, probably Bellow's most famous British advocate, once noted that Bellow's names are “Dickensian in their resonance”, meaning, presumably, that like “Tulkinghorn”, they connote more than they precisely denote, and “Abe Ravelstein” is no exception. Alongside the evident marking of the character's Jewish heritage, the name suggests him as something to be unravelled, and this is the task which Chick, the novel's narrator, takes on himself. Chick's younger friend Ravelstein, a distinguished professor of political philosophy, has long been “at ease with large statements, big issues, and famous men”, a mentor to former students in high political office. But it is not until Chick suggests that Ravelstein publish his ideas in popular form that the philosopher makes the leap from intellectual respectability to remunerative accessibility—a timely move, considering his material tastes:

The glass top of the coffee table in front of it was about four inches thick. On it, Ravelstein sometimes spread his effects—the solid-gold Mont Blanc fountain pen, his ＄200,000 wrist watch, the golden gadget that cut his smuggled Havanas, the extra-large cigarette box filled with Marlboros, his Dunhill lighters, the heavy square glass ashtrays—the long butts neurotically puffed at once or twice and then broken.

In return, Ravelstein offers Chick the opportunity to become his biographer, to transmit the essence of him as a private person rather than a political thinker; however, the whole process of trying to tell the story turns out to be as much a matter of autobiographical reminiscence as of conventional biography. As he remarks to his younger second wife, Rosamund (herself a Ravelstein graduate), Chick may himself be more of a satellite of the great man than he has realized:

“What I'm probably trying to say that in Ravelstein's view I may have nothing more to do in this life than commemorate him.”

“That is an odd thought for anyone to have.”

“He felt he was giving me a great subject—the subject of subjects. …”

There is a characteristically evasive Bellow pun in the duplicity of “subject” here; Chick is feeling subjected to his topic, as Joseph in Dangling Man feels imprisoned by his freedom (“Long live regimentation!”). But the revelation of Ravelstein's impending death from an AIDS-related disease also points to a deeper mutual dependency between the two men, and occasions a long chain of reminiscences, from academic proselytes affecting the Ravelstein “look”, to the sorrows of Chick's first marriage; somewhat remorsefully, Chick comes to recognize that he has been part of a double act (“since I can't depict him without self-involvement my presence on the margins will have to be tolerated”).

Bellow has always been a writer more notable for smartening up than for “dumbing down”: the mock-Virgilian echoes in Augie March, Moses Herzog's written commerce with the living and the dead, point to a novelist willing to take his art seriously, however comical the modes in which it works in practice. In recent years, as some areas of literary studies have felt (often guiltily) beholden to other disciplines in order to justify their own existence, Bellow has come to sound increasingly belligerent and sidelined as when he commented, in an interview in 1991:

This continent is the Kingdom of Frivolity, while all the “towering figures” are in Eastern Europe. This is how literary-political intellectuals view the present world. It isn't contemporary literature alone that is threatened by this. The classics themselves are shooting, not drifting, Lethewards. We may lose everything at this rate. … My spirits are as high as ever. Not despair—anger. Contempt and rage. For this latest and longest betrayal by puffy-headed academics and intellectuals.

The vehemence of tone may be new, but the fundamental complaint is intimate with the forces which have driven his fiction from the beginning of his career.

Although he has written in styles approaching the fantastic—notably in Henderson the Rain King—his work continually braces itself against the actual and situated; since we are here and now, his novels often ask, what are we to make of it? In reaching towards the answers, he has developed what is now clearly identifiable as the Bellow style: a mixture of streetwise comedy and highbrow disquisition, aimed self-consciously to match the big nineteenth-century novels which he so admires, works whose range he thinks has been lost in much modern literature. What, in his best novels, saves his protagonists from irritating self-obsession is the keen irony with which Bellow sets their malaise in context; as much as the Hendersons and Herzogs may chime with some of Bellow's own thoughts and experiences, they are distanced from him by various existential banana skins which remind them that the world is bigger and other than themselves. Keats once wrote that “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses”, and when Bellow succeeds, he grounds his characters' inquiries in their pulses, in their lived lives. In contrast, the narrative and the gnomic never feel fully integrated or creatively at odds in Ravelstein.

Bellow's characters are continually finding their wills tied to other things, including other aspects of their own personalities, hence the prevalence of inner voices in his work, from Joseph's “Spirit of Alternatives” in Dangling Man to the Cartesian slapstick of Eugene Henderson's struggle with the “I want, I want, I want” within him. But a human will can only live in time within a finite human body, as Chick and Ravelstein concur:

Ravelstein had come to agree that it was important to note how people looked. Their ideas are not enough—their theoretical convictions and political views. If you don't take into account their haircuts, the hang of their pants, their taste in skirts and blouses, their style of driving a car or eating a dinner, your knowledge is incomplete.

As a result, Ravelstein is a twilight book, continually reminding a reader that its two protagonists are housed in frail and decaying bodies: as Ravelstein enters his final decline, Bellow does not flinch from his “singular, total, almost geological baldness” and his legs, “like prize-winning marrows because his ankles were so swollen—‘That fucking edema!’ he said.” After Ravelstein's death, Chick comes within a whisker of a similar fate by radically different means, red-snapper poisoning (“As was explained to me later in Boston, the cigua toxin was quickly excreted by the body but not before it had radically damaged the nervous system. Very much like Ravelstein's Guillain-Barré syndrome.”) In the face of this encroaching mortality, Chick's narrative becomes a nostalgic trawl through the resonances of Ravelstein's life and death not least for Chick's two marriages. “You don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death”, is the novel's final sentence. There is a notable tradition of concentrating on biographical minutiae as a doomed stand against death—for instance, the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, and a work sitting in the shadows of Ravelstein, Boswell's Life of Johnson, in that the narrative gets noticeably slower, the closer its subject comes to his end.

However, it is not always enlightening to follow Chick as he tries to balance the duties of personal friend and public advocate for a life. Perhaps the central problem with the novel is that Ravelstein himself is neither accessible nor inaccessible enough, neither satisfactorily explored nor fascinatingly unknowable; in Chick's reminiscence, he is as distant from Johnson as he is from Gatsby, despite an echo of Fitzgerald which cannot be wholly coincidental (“From my bedroom window I looked across to what had once been Ravelstein's place. You saw the lights. There were no more parties.”) Of course, this being a Bellow novel, there are sequences of great beauty and accomplishment, whether Chick's final memory of Ravelstein listening to classical music amid the sound of feral parrots (“gesturing because he can't be heard in all this bird-noise”), or his philosophical wisecracks: “I was not about to get into the rink with this Sumo champion representing Platonic metaphysics. One bump of his powerful belly and I'd be out of the brilliant ring and back again in the noisy dark.”

The reference to “Platonic metaphysics” here is not accidental. Bellow has explored in previous novels the idea (given brilliant form in Dicken's fiction) that people might live on in the influence of their attachments and kindnesses: Henderson, for example, flees the Wariri with the lion cub supposed to contain the soul of dead king Dahfu. In Ravelstein, the central motif—one that is a little too hard to miss—is the metaphor from Plato's Symposium, of halved hermaphrodite souls (“So that generation after generation we seek the missing half, longing to be whole again”). Bellow fills the novel with doubles and double acts: the gay Ravelstein and the twice-married Chick, vaudeville comedians, two African-American Michaels (Jackson and Jordan), even Chick's first wife, Vela, checking herself obsessively in the mirror, like Anna Coblin in The Adventures of Augie March. Although he never quite gets round to proving “Our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love”, Bellow sets isolation and separation alongside oases of solidarity so often that the inference is hard to avoid. There are glimpses in Ravelstein of the great novel on age, death and friendship it could have been, but—and this is almost unprecedented in Bellow's writing—it is hard to get as interested in Ravelstein and Chick as the author would like us to be. The structure is all in place, yet never quite coheres in practice to sustain Bellow's meditations.

Ravelstein is a chamber piece, and it would be unreasonable to expect all Bellow's novels to be as rangy, wise and heartbreaking as Augie March; nevertheless. Bellow has exacting standards. Ravelstein's belief that “all the great texts had esoteric significance” echoes Bellow's own assertion, from 1990, that one should “take certain masterpieces into yourself as if they were communion wafers”, and it is those standards which the new novel fails to satisfy. Similarly, Chick says of the distinctive quality of his friend's life: “It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think—to say it in your own words, without compromise.” Not unlike Bellow's own achievement—but it is an achievement which has, unfortunately, found its best expression elsewhere.