How fitting that I finished reading Ravelstein while on the plane home from my weekend visit to my grandmother in Canada. You see, Saul Bellow was born in Canada and when he was nine his parents moved to Humboldt Park in Chicago. Bellow eventually attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.
And despite my also having a Canadian background, and living in Chicago, and the fact that Saul Bellow has won both the Pulitzer Prize (1976 - Humboldt's Gift) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1976), I'd never heard of him before. For all this, Ravelstein is Bellow's final novel. Published in 2000, five years before his death, Ravelstein is written in the style of a memoir.
Abe Ravelstein is a professor with lots of opinions and ideas. Urged by his friend Chick, Ravelstein pens a book and finally meets with commercial success equal to his spending appetites. In turn, Ravelstein urges Chick to write a memoir of Ravelstein - you see, Ravelstein is dying, in the 90s, from AIDS-related complications.
Chick, however, is unsure how to begin. And what unravels in the prose, is the tight intertwining of friendship, where a portrait of the subject is not complete without an equally revealing portrait of the storyteller. Clearly Ravelstein holds a place in Chick's life that cannot be duplicated, and his thoughts and opinions have formed some of who Chick is and his loss has left a large hole in Chick's life.
Chick's style of telling the memoir is conversational, anecdotal -it's almost as if you've sat down with Chick at table and asked him to tell you about his late friend Abe Ravelstein. His tale marches backwards and forwards. Short on facts, the novel somehow paints a more complete picture of the man than a straightforward biography.
The way in which the memoir genre is explored in the novel is a huge feat. The novel is said to be based on Bellow's friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, the philosopher Allan Bloom. Bloom taught at UofC and was well known in academic circles, but gained notoriety with his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind which heavily criticized contemporary American higher education.
If I had anything negative to say about the book, is that while brilliant, it is clear that Bellow was writing, perhaps not for the average person, but really for his contemporaries and colleagues - those that shared a common language and experience as he and Bloom. The book delves heavily into critiques on literary theory and philosophy, subjects that are a bit lost on me and probably the average reader as well.
This may actually be a strong support for Ravelstein and therefore Bellow's argument about the failing of today's higher education. Chick notes that Universities today are well equipped to turn out engineers and mathematicians, but woefully inept at producing the level of caliber of great thinkers and philosophers who were once the recipients of a liberal arts education. As a recipient of an English undergraduate degree, I can see his point.
All this can seem a bit of sour grapes as well as it means that type of men Bellow - and therefore Bloom and Ravelstein - were was becoming less valuable to society as a whole. And therefore Bloom and Bellow, at the ends of their lives were becoming all to aware of something lost. Bellow has been criticized for being out of touch with modern society and his novels are apparently not well liked in modernist and feminist circles.
But what stands out to me, is that Ravelstein captures a world and a language that is somehow slipping away from the author. On the other hand, the language of love and friendship, and the way we define ourselves through the lens of those who have impacted us most, is a concept that is timeless.
4/5 Stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment