Word: bellow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...notion that his new novel is principally an outing or an expose of his dear friend upsets and frustrates Bellow: "This is a problem that writers of fiction always have to face in this country. People are literal minded, and they say, 'Is it true? If it is true, is it factually accurate? If it isn't factually accurate, why isn't it factually accurate?' Then you tie yourself into knots, because writing a novel in some ways resembles writing a biography, but it really isn't. It is full of invention. If there were no invention, it wouldn...
...impatient that when the subject of Bloom and AIDS is raised, Bellow responds, "I'm sorry to see you getting me on this particular track because I don't want to be on it." All that he will say, without mentioning Bloom by name, is, "He said, 'I trust you to write this. I know it's going to be fiction.' He said, 'I'd like you to do this...
...Bellow's novels have prompted this sort of what's-the-real-story queries before, most notably his Pulitzer prizewinning Humboldt's Gift (1975). In that book, the brilliant but mentally deteriorating poet Von Humboldt Fleisher was widely regarded as a fictional copy of Delmore Schwartz, a friend and onetime mentor to the young Bellow. The author never denied an imaginative connection between Humboldt and Schwartz, but neither did he think it a topic much worth discussing. And he was right. For a quarter-century, untold thousands of people who never heard of Delmore Schwartz have read Humboldt's Gift...
That news may produce a few groans in the audience, but any protesters should just settle down for a minute. Plot has never been the sharpest arrow in Bellow's quiver, and Ravelstein holds true to form. It might, like the author's earlier works, be called a novel of ideas, but that is too bloodless a description of Bellow's signature accomplishment. Again, as always before, he portrays people with ideas--sometimes good, sometimes wacky--bumping into one another and sparking unpredictable reactions. Seasoned Bellow readers do not look forward to what will happen next but rather to what...
...exchanges between Chick and Ravelstein cover a broad array of eternal questions, including, inevitably, death and the possibility of an afterlife. But the novel reads like the antithesis of abstractions. Ravelstein brims with life thanks to Chick's, that is, Bellow's, comic observations on the passing scene. Here are French waiters "working like acrobats" at a dinner Ravelstein throws for Chick at an exclusive Paris restaurant. Here is Chick on Ravelstein's notoriously messy eating habits: "An experienced hostess would have spread newspapers under his chair." Here is Ravelstein amused, laughing "like Picasso's wounded horse in Guernica, rearing...