Dear Jonathan,
Saul Bellow has had bigger ambitions for his novels than any American since Henry James. On at least three occasions, he’s fulfilled them. If someone were to name Saul Bellow as the greatest American novelist, period, I would not howl in disagreement. Ravelstein is full of passages that vie with Bellow’s best work. But I can’t agree with your high opinion of the book as a whole.
To take what’s both brilliant and typical:
1. That gift for observation you mentioned. As they’re finishing their dessert wine at a Lucullan meal Ravelstein throws in a five-star Parisian restaurant, Chick reflects, “We had come to the estuary of the feast and were once more facing the gulf of common fare.” Or take Ravelstein’s description of his brutal, anti-intellectual father: “His mind was a sort of Georgia swamp–Okefenokee with neurotic lights playing over it.”
2. The sense of humor. Whether or not Bellow is the greatest American novelist, he is the funniest great novelist. The food-poisoned Chick has nightmare hallucinations about meeting his faithless, alimony-gorging ex-wife–in a bank, with her lover. He explains to his current wife, “It has a specific kind of satisfaction, the bad of it guarantees it as real experience.” Elsewhere, of Ravelstein: “He came out of intensive care unable to walk. But he quickly recovered partial use of his hands. He had to have hands because he had to smoke.” He doesn’t just say Ravelstein wears glasses. He notes: “He swore off contact lenses after he lost one in a spaghetti sauce he was cooking.” (You can almost taste it.)
3. The narrative voice. Bellow’s narrators tend to combine two things you almost never see together–authority and self-deprecation. It’s not just that it’s a pleasant voice; the rarity of it indicates that it’s harder and greater thing to pull off than the authority-plus-self-aggrandizement of, say, Hemingway, Greene, or Paul Theroux. It never seems phony. Ravelstein tails Elizabeth Taylor in an airport, not daring to introduce himself. Chick remarks, “As a best-selling author you were on equal footing with other celebrities,” then adds to himself: “But no.” When Chick says, “We are a people of teachers,” he thinks he’s making a point about Jews, but in a deft way, Bellow uses the observation to render unassailable Chick’s inner sense that he is Ravelstein’s inferior.
4. The moral seriousness. I’m with you that Chick’s dialogue with himself is the heart of the book. Would you agree that the fullest exposition of what Bellow is after in this matter is to be found in the pages after he first mentions HIV–i.e., his discussion of his “private metaphysics” on pp. 95-97? That’s a portentous passage, but Bellow’s willingness to entertain big moral questions lends power to the tiniest en passant observations, turning them into booming pronouncements that drop like bombs: “Nine-tenths of modern innocence is little more than indifference to vice, a resolve not to be affected by all that you might read, hear or see,” is a marital gripe. “One reason why violence is so popular [Ravelstein says] may be that psychiatric insights have worn us out and we get satisfaction from seeing them blown away with automatic weapons …” is Bellow talking about TV.
But here’s the problem. In his very greatest novels–Augie March, Herzog, Henderson the Rain King–this arsenal of gifts is deployed, for all those novels’ seemingly rollicking wildness, with extraordinary precision. In Ravelstein there’s imprecision, and I’m not as sure as you are that it’s a matter of “consciously dispensing with certain requirements of form.”
That’s a smart point you make about Ravelstein’s having elements not just of Bloom but of Bellow. Maybe it’s not surprising that Ravelstein and Chick blur together; that’s what happens in a friendship, after all. But I don’t think all the overlap between the two is a willed thing. At Page 43, Chick notes: “… as Ravelstein saw, I was willing to take risks–abnormally willing. ‘Humongous risks’ was how he put it.” Bellow is using the word to limn Ravelstein’s character, but undermines himself by having Chick use the word “humongous,” quite naturally, to describe a divorce settlement on Page 13 and an obstacle on Page162.
There’s too much dialogue between Chick and Rosamund about the merits of writing a book like this, a hemming and hawing that doesn’t ring of Bellow to me. (Although this is less an old master’s vice than a young one’s.) There’s dialogue meant merely to hurry the action along: “But what’s that got to do with the Crillon or Michael Jackson?” There are clumsy transitions that lumber back to the narrative: “But we are still atop the Hotel Crillon …” or “Morris Herbst, to get back to him …” And the repetitiveness you mentioned–about Ravelstein’s spending money like he’s throwing it off the back of a train, about Ravelstein’s impatience with nature, about American nihilism being nihilism without the abyss–may be intended, but it doesn’t read like it.
I had meant to talk about AIDS, Leo Strauss, and the uses and abuses of biography-disguised-as-fiction, but I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Over to you, Jonathan.
Best,
Chris
