Word: bellower
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...Bellow picks and chooses at details and fills in the context with tight prose. One example will illustrate. Early in the novel, he devotes hundreds of words to a description of a typical evening at Ravelstein's Chicago apartment, watching basketball with his male grad students. The deeply Athenophilic Ravelstein is surrounded by eager, virile, attractive young men-"Ravelstein's young men." Bellow writes, "At his basketball parties, Ravelstein passed pizza slices among his graduate student guests, his bald head swiveling toward the busy, colored TV screen behind him. His lot, his crew, his disciples, his clones, who dressed...
...Bellow writes many philosophical asides into the book. These very brief but highly content-full paragraphs remind us not only of Ravelstein's appetite for all the belles lettres, but also, by proxie, of Allan Bloom's own writing style. In the Closing of the American Mind, the screed on anti-intellectualism and academic nihilism that made him rich and famous,Bloom dispatches most Continental philosophy in a page, and postmodernism in a few short paragraphs. Here was a man who saw in grand narratives but could very easily produce piquant details at the first challenge...
...point, Ravelstein cryptically asks the narrator (the Bellow character, called "Chick") for $500 dollars. I say cryptically because a fuller explanation was written in an earlier draft of the book-Ravelstein had to pay a beautiful, 16-year-old African-American male prostitute for sex. For some reason, and much to the consternation of reviewers like Christopher Hitchens, Bellow chose to excise the more salacious item from the draft of his published work...
...book is about Allan Bloom. Nearly every reviewer-me included-reads the real life Allan Bloom where Bellow wrote Ravelstein. We can't disentangle the two, and I'm not sure we're supposed to. I find it interesting that Bellow has apologized publicly for revealing so much about Bloom's life. And the book's hesitancy is testament to this being a long-standing conflict for Bellow...
...portrait of Ravelstein is an accurate analogy, Bellow saw Allan Bloom as passionate, sexual, a lover of young (very young) men, guided as the Greeks were by moral aestheticism. And yet he was a firm contrarian, deplored action on impulse, and was convinced, almost mythically, of the steadiness of certain virtues and of the necessity of a reflective life...