Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Saul Bellow at 84 has written a novel as graceful and funny as Ravelstein. But who could have predicted that he would also stir up a hornets’ nest of controversy? The character of Abe Ravelstein is based on Bellow’s late friend and colleague, Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, the 1987 best-seller that became a lightning rod for the culture wars of the Reagan era. What hasn’t heretofore been public knowledge is that Bloom, who died in 1992, was homosexual. By outing his friend and asserting that his death resulted from AIDS, Bellow is facing accusations of betrayal and exploitation.
    Some have gone as far as to suggest that Ravelstein is a sort of jealous revenge enacted against Bloom, who wrote The Closing of the American Mind at Bellow’s urging. Bloom’s book championed the Greek classics and condemned modern college campuses as lax and ineffectual (with much of the blame placed on the 1960s counterculture and the burgeoning climate of political correctness). It made Bloom a millionaire and an unlikely egghead celebrity welcomed at White House dinners and invited on Oprah. He was vilified by left-wing critics to such a degree that potential detractors were just as anxious to read his book as were enthusiastic supporters. Not even Bellow’s 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature could equal the attention that was lavished on Bloom and his enormously successful jeremiad, which had the throat-clenching subtitle of "How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students."
    Let the pundits have their field day with Ravelstein. Let them again dredge up the old charges that Bellow lacks the skills of a first-rate novelist, that he writes chit-chatty essays in the guise of fiction, that his characters are crudely cribbed from friends and family members and ex-wives, and that his own outsized ego is the star of the show. When the bickering dies down and the smoke of recrimination clears, Ravelstein should emerge as the heartfelt masterpiece it assuredly is. Regardless of who Abe Ravelstein is modeled after, he is a fully realized character that lives on the page with the elan of a modern-day Dickens eccentric. As with Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow’s other great roman à clef (based on his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz), Ravelstein evokes with detail and precision the map of a mind, the outline of a soul. While the earlier novel showed us the dark and punishing slide of a failed literary career, Ravelstein presents a tale of outrageous good fortune -- it’s "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" with smarter questions and a French beret for Regis.
    We first meet the sixtyish bald-pated Ravelstein attired in a Japanese kimono and ensconced on the seventh floor of the Hotel Crillon in Paris (two floors below is pop star Michael Jackson and his entourage). "He had written a book," we’re told by Ravelstein’s visiting friend, Chick, who is also the novel’s narrator (and Bellow’s surrogate), "a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator." Asleep in the next room is Ravelstein’s gay Asian lover, Nikki ("layers of black hair reaching his glossy shoulders"). Chick and Ravelstein dawdle over a tray of wild strawberries and hot coffee and begin an in-depth discussion of -- what else? -- the economic policies of John Maynard Keynes at the close of the First World War. It turns out that Chick has written a brief biographical sketch of Keynes at Ravelstein’s request, with the understanding that Chick might next attempt a memoir about Ravelstein.
    Bellow has always enjoyed capturing the exuberance of intellectuals talking, thinking, and dazzling one another with high culture and low jokes:

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 Brooks. "He comes down from Mount Sinai with the commandments. God had handed down twenty but ten fall from Mel Brooks’s arms when he sees the children of Israel rioting around the Golden Calf." Ravelstein loved these Catskill entertainments; he had a natural gift for them.