Ravelstein - Literary Significance and Criticism - Literary Reception

Literary Reception

Describing the novel in his memoir Experience, Martin Amis wrote: "Ravelstein is a full-length novel. It is also, in my view, a masterpiece with no analogues. The world has never heard this prose before: prose of such tremulous and crystallized beauty." For Ravelstein is "numinous. It constitutes an act of resuscitation, and in its pages Bloom lives"

Literary theorist John Sutherland wrote: "The novel explores, in its attractively rambling way, two dauntingly large and touchy themes: death and American Jewishness ... Not quite American (as the Canadian-born Jew, Bellow, is not quite American), Abe Ravelstein is the American mind and Bellow its finest living (thank God) voice. We should all have such friends."

The literary critic Sir Malcolm Bradbury, stated: "Just when we didn't expect it, there now wonderfully comes a large new novel from the master... Our world is a world of ideas, pervaded by minds, thoughts, notions, beyond which lies what we seek with such difficulty: wholeness, silence and love. Via print, Ravelstein survives; and Bellow survives. So does fiction itself."

William Leith, writing in The Independent, argued: "As you would expect, Ravelstein, as a character, is beautifully drawn. He is "impatient with hygiene". He smokes constantly. "When he coughed you heard the sump at the bottom of a mine shaft echoing." His "biological patchiness was a given". Those who invite him to dinner must reckon with "the spilling, splashing, crumbling, the nastiness of his napkin after he had used it, the pieces of cooked meat scattered under the table". Like many Bellow characters, he has developed a mean streak. "Nothing," he declares, "is more bourgeois than the fear of death."... This is the late late message from Bellow: death is humiliating. But there might be consolations. I almost forgot to say that Ravelstein is a brilliant novel"

For Ron Rosenbaum, Ravelstein was Bellow's greatest novel: "It's a rapturous celebration of the life of the mind, as well as a meditation on the glory of sensual life and on the tenebrous permeable boundary we all eventually pass over, the one between life and death... a novel Bellow wrote in his 80s, which I found absolutely, irresistibly seductive, both sensually and intellectually, one in which the sublimity and pathos of life and art are not joined to each other with heavy welds but transformed into a beautiful, seamless, unravelable fabric."

On its publication, the Harvard literary critic James Wood wrote: "How extraordinary, then, that Bellow's substantial new novel, Ravelstein, written in his 85th year, should be so full of the old, cascading power... Ravelstein... is large, flamboyant, and excessively clumsy. When he laughs, he throws his head back "like Picasso's wounded horse in Guernica". He loves fine clothes, Lanvin jackets, Zegna ties, but tends to spill food on them. Hostesses know to put newspaper underneath Ravelstein's chair at a dinner party. At home, he wanders around in an exquisite silk dressing-gown, chain-smoking. His apartment is stuffed with beautiful glass and silverware, with the finest Italian and French linens, and thousands of CDs. He reclines on a black leather couch, listening to Baroque music, is enormously learned, and given to oration on a thousand subjects... By all accounts, including Bellow's, this is Allan Bloom as his friends knew him."