Vaster than life, with a flair for luxury, Abe Ravelstein is "a large Jewish man from Dayton, Ohio". A once-poor academic, he has finally become rich through a best-seller. "He had gone public with his ideas. He had written a book - difficult but popular - a spirited, intelligent, war-like book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator." And, boy, does Abe know how to spend. But he is also a learned, intellectual guru who dominates and enchances his world and that of his students - and especially that of his old pal Chick, the narrator, who had encouraged him to write the book in the first place.
Saul Bellow's 13th novel is both familiar and fresh, streetwise and lyric, possessing all the ease expected of a literary master whose first book, Dangling Man, was published as long ago as 1944 - as well as a powerful sense of a realist still observing, still coming to terms with the facts as presented. Ease there may be, but there is no complacency. Bellow is a responsive thinker. Author of classics such as The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize The Day (1957), Herzog (1964), Humboldt's Gift (1975), The Dean's December (1982), and the subtle lament More Die of Heartbreak, (1986) his earthy magic owes a great deal to a humane grasp of existentialism, together with an uncanny ability to approach his fiction through a philosophical intelligence which is both sophisticated and reassuringly simple. This is the writer who has best summed up human experience, "we are, for the time being, the living, the maimed and defective". Above all, he has invariably presented his views through protagonists who are credible, wised-up victims of life.
Late, late Bellow is proving as good as the early, the middle and the later - well represented by the novellas A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection (both in 1989) and The Actual (1997) a compelling review of the truth, which is among his finest work.
This new novel is a tender and funny portrait of Abe as seen through the eyes of Chick, his friend, and, on Abe's request, biographer. It is also a story about friendship, particularly that of Chick and Ravelstein, which acquires depth and authenticity through realistic dialogue as Bellow presents a well-matched pair of minds exchanging views with the elegance of philosophers and the terse candour of gangsters in collusion. Most of all, though, it takes a candid look at life and death and the way chance events tend to make one think and rethink. Newly remarried Chick, the survivor of a tough divorce from an Eastern European physicist, is already an old man, "some 20 years older" than Ravelstein. The dying Ravelstein is viciously honest and hilarious on the subject of his pal's ex-wife. In fact he had figured out Vela, an expert in "chaos physics", long before she issued Chick with his walking papers.
"She must catch up on her breathing - in snatches. I've watched her" said Ravelstein, "and I don't think she inhales and exhales except in an underground way." Not surprisingly, Vela doesn't much care for Ravelstein either.
Jewishness and Europe, history and politics are abiding Bellow themes, while life's confusions have always been another major preoccupation. His various characters have experienced the most awful emotional messes and central to his work is the thesis that when it comes to relationships, the cleverest people commit the stupidest follies. Chick, the narrator, is a typical Bellow alter ego, a writer with an interest in books and a feel for real life. Bellow intellectuals will watch a football game as instinctively as they will choose a volume of Voltaire. "Ravelstein with his bald powerful head was at ease with large statements, big issues and famous men, with decades, eras, centuries. He was, however, just as familiar with entertainers like Mel Brooks as with the classics and could go from Thucydides' huge tragedy to Moses as played by Mel Brooks."
As the novel opens Chick and his new wife, one of Abe's former students, and Ravelstein are all in Paris, staying at the same expensive hotel. Another guest is superstar Michael Jackson. "Terrific, isn't it, having this pop circus," observes Abe. Elsewhere Chick remarks of Jackson, "His air I thought was wistfully transitional."
Throughout the narrative, Chick's remarks move between profound and the ordinary. Bellow never allows his work, or his narrators, to lose touch with the commonplace. "I was the neater eater. Ravelstein when he was feeding and speaking made you feel that something biological was going on, that he was stoking his system and nourishing his ideas."
Elsewhere Chick the observer returns to this subject. "He was a curious man to watch at the table. His feeding habits needed getting used to. Mrs Glyph, the wife of the founder of his department, told him once that he must never again expect her to ask him to dinner . . . Maria Glyph said to Abe Ravelstein as he was leaving, `You drank from your Coke bottle, and T.S. Eliot was watching - with horror'." Chick continues, "But somehow I can't believe that drinking from a Coke bottle was the whole story (and what, to begin with, was a Coke bottle doing on the table!). Faculty wives knew that when Ravelstein came to dinner they would be faced with a big cleaning job afterwards - the spilling, splashing, crumbling, the nastiness of his napkin after he had used it . . . an experienced hostess would spread newspapers under his chair. He wouldn't have minded."
Ravelstein's colourful antics and stories dominate the narrative, but Chick is not interested in presenting a caricature. "He could be correct enough on serious occasions," recalls Chick, who stresses in matters related "to the purpose of our existence: say, the correct ordering of the human soul - he was as stable and earnest as any of the deepest and greatest of teachers. Ravelstein was vigorous and hard" and possesses an absolute belief in love. His regard for Chick is also convincing; behind the buddy banter lies shrewd concern: "As some Russian puts it," said Ravelstein - "You always turn towards the Russians, Chick, when you try to explain what you are really up to. But in addition you have always been working for years at the problem of arranging your life - your private life, that is."
BELLOW'S prose has always been vivid and physical, his descriptions of people memorable, as exact as a camera's eye. Even a minor character called Battle comes to life in a couple of sentences: "A man in his sixties, he was big, ruddy, fleshy, his huge chilled face as thick as sweet red pepper. His hair was dense and long, and he sometimes reminded me of the Quaker on the oatmeal box. He had energy enough to keep two men warm." It is not a chance appearance either, through him we begin to learn exactly how ill Ravelstein is.
Of course it is primarily Abe Ravelstein's story as Chick, a worthy biographer, tells it, yet it is also his own. Chick comes to terms with his friend's slow and dignified slide towards death while remaining aware of his own. Late in the narrative he describes a mystery illness which afflicts him while on holiday. As Chick almost dies, an urgency, even fear, undercuts these sequences. But there is nothing egotistical about Chick's memories of his friend, which run parallel to his own experiences.
The genius of this exciting, thoughtful narrative lies in its honesty, its gentle tone, lack of pretension and the portrayal of the central character, a generous, greedy man of learning and wit who explains of his favourite pastime, "when I do it it's not gossip, it's social history". Early in the novel Chick remarks "Ravelstein's legacy to me was a subject - he thought he was giving me a subject, perhaps the best one I ever had - perhaps the only really important one. But what such a legacy signified was that he would die before me." It is an observation which is both sombre and exhilarating, as is this wise, rich novel.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
