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velop his monograph on the economist Maynard Keynes
by studying the minutiae of his letters home from
a post-First World War reparations conference. Such
minutiae, he suggests, reveal the larger truth. Chick
seems to be trying to do the same with Ravelstein: we
see the way he holds his mobile phone between his
bare knees, and as his expensive Japanese kimono falls
away it reveals “legs paler than milk … the shinbone
long and the calf muscle abrupt, without roundness.”
Once Ravelstein is dead, the novel becomes more
complex as Chick describes how he stalled for a few
years before writing the book. Clearly, the facts weren’t
enough. Before Ravelstein dies, Chick divorces his
self-regarding physicist wife and, soon after, marries
one of Ravelstein’s pupils, the meeker, much younger
Rosamund. On a tropical holiday, Chick eats a poisoned
fish and becomes ill. Rosamund gets him home despite
his unwillingness. It saves his life. Only after this neardeath
experience is Chick able to write the memoir of
his dead friend. This happened in reality too. Bellow
says he was “nine-tenths gone”. Perhaps being on the
edge of oblivion gave him the necessary insight, just as
it gave an insight into Rosamund’s love.
While Ravelstein’s hypocrisy is suggested, the
bigger issue – of America – is barely mentioned.
This is odd because it possessed Ravelstein and
fuelled his best-seller. Perhaps Bellow could not
step back from himself in this case. Bloom saw the
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and
60s as the beginning of the Fall of America. What
led him to think this? The invasion of Cuba and
South Vietnam? The subsequent three million native
deaths and long-term chemical damage? No, it is
the academic opposition. He says their questioning
of long-accepted values, and subsequent pandering
to the tastes of the permissive society equates with
what the philosopher Heidegger did by supporting
the Nazis from his University chair. One might argue
the opposite, and say that US academics were in fact
the true descendants of America’s founding fathers
rebelling against unjust Imperial might. It is not even
hinted at here despite Ravelstein’s fascination.
He has many ex-pupils in high places in the US Administration.
They are more like disciples. Ravelstein,
we are told, sought out the best pupils and taught them
to ‘forget their parents’. Ravelstein wanted each to
be a ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate onto which he could
transfer his learning. Once in power, these disciples
would call him up and tell him the latest inside news
– such as Bush’s final decision to end the Gulf War.
Chick is impressed. Ravelstein laps it up. There seems
to be no irony intended as Bloom talks to one of his
high-powered disciples, puffs away on a Cuban cigar –
made illegal to punish a defiant nation – and dismisses
the ‘foolish anti-Americanism’ of French intellectuals.
This knee-jerk conflation of opposites is meant to be
an example of Ravelstein’s common sense. One has
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