Unraveling Ravelstein: A New Interpretation

Ravelstein (2000), Saul Bellow's miraculous last novel, was published when he was 85, five years after he had managed to survive a near-fatal attack of food poisoning and four months after his daughter, Rose, was born. Most critics praised the literary qualities of the book: its stimulating tour of Bellow's mind and brilliant allusions that range from the Book of Job to vaudeville jokes. They immediately identified the main character with Allan Bloom, his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, and Chick, the narrator, with Bellow himself.

James Wood (Guardian, April 14, 2000) states that "this is Allan Bloom as his friends knew him." Michiko Kakutani (New York Times, April 20) simply calls Chick "an authorial stand-in." Jonathan Wilson (New York Times Book Review, April 23) agrees that Chick is "skintight to Bellow." The reviewers fixed the interpretation and the life-writers dutifully followed. James Atlas's biography of Bellow (2000) confirms that Chick is "a shrewd interpreter of his doomed, geniusy friend." Zachary Leader's biography of Bellow (2018) merely endorses Chick's adoration and describes Ravelstein's "great-souled virtues and attractions."

All Bellow's novels transform his emotional and intellectual struggles into fiction that stays close, in a sometimes-shocking way, to real life and people. This novel provoked fierce controversy about Bellow's exposure of Bloom's hidden homosexuality and death from AIDS, as well as Bellow's savage portrait of his Romanian ex-wife, whom he calls Vela. If we are taken in by the cunning use of the memoir style and the emotional drive of the story, we misinterpret the most intriguing aspect of the novel and fail to see that Chick's attitude toward Ravelstein is not identical to Bellow's.

It's clear that Bellow admired the charismatic Bloom in real life, just as Chick admires Ravelstein in the novel. Chick plans to write Ravelstein's biography and must justify his project by admiring his subject and accepting his friend's carefully created self-image. Chick (a name that suggests he's subservient to Ravelstein's mother hen) is impressed by his friend's excessive and ostentatious luxury, and by his precious Lalique crystal that his anti-Semitic Polish maid carelessly breaks when washing it under the kitchen faucet. Ravelstein's personal traits reveal that Chick is an untrustworthy narrator and has been deceived by a loathsome rather than admirable character. The massive evidence in the novel suggests that Bellow portrays Chick ironically and that readers are meant to question rather than share his admiration.

Bellow emphasizes Ravelstein's unattractive, even freakish physical appearance. Nearly six feet six inches tall, with clumsy gait, spindly legs and trembling hands, he has "geological baldness" and a soft oval-melon head. He is personally dirty and splatters espresso on his $4,500 Lanvin coat. Uncommonly rude, he's always critical of others and pleased with himself. He ignores his neighbors' complaints and continues to play extremely loud Baroque music. He defiantly lights up a chain of cigarettes in front of a "No Smoking" sign in the hospital and justifies his lack of concern for other patients by telling his visitors, "If you leave because you hate tobacco more than you love ideas, you won't be missed."

He flaunts his boorish manners by drinking from a Coke bottle at a luncheon to honor T. S. Eliot. He outrages Vela by bursting into her bedroom and seeing her in her underwear. Financially dishonest and extravagantly spendthrift, when deeply in debt he has bought luxury goods with other people's money. He's indifferent, even hostile, to the beauty of nature, "didn't care about the fields, trees, pools, flowers, birds," and absurdly insists that "conversation was possible only in the city, between men."

Ravelstein goes to great lengths to obliterate by "maximum deracination" his humble provincial origins in Dayton, Ohio. (Bloom came from Indianapolis.) He has vulgar taste, adorns his bed with a mink coverlet and himself with a Nazi-style "general-staff fur-lined suede coat that dragged on the ground." His otiose, luxurious...