Word: chicks
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Ravelstein owes his good, big fortune to Chick, who suggested that his friend write a book in the hope of bringing his expensive tastes and his professorial income into closer alignment. But Chick does not consider himself Ravelstein's benefactor or mentor: "Though I was his senior by some years he saw himself as my teacher." Chick sees things the same way and willingly obeys Ravelstein's instructions: "He wanted me to write his biography and at the same time he wanted to rescue me from my pernicious habits. He thought I was stuck in privacy and should be restored...
When Ravelstein becomes ill and starts declining toward death, Chick realizes that the biographical task he had taken on as sport, never believing he would outlive his subject, has turned earnest indeed. Ravelstein is what he finally, after the passage of some duly noted years and difficulties, produces. This is a book, in some sense, about the writing of a book...
...love and admiration that Chick lavishes on Ravelstein, he also notes some of their deep disagreements on fundamental matters. Ravelstein, the brilliant teacher of classical philosophy and political theory, thinks Chick's artistic temperament as a writer of fiction represents a refusal to grow up and grapple with the real world of public affairs: "Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopt rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics." Chick responds, "His severity did me good," but adds, "I had no intention, however, of removing...
...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...
Late in the novel, after Ravelstein's death, Chick himself nearly dies after eating a bad red snapper during a Caribbean vacation with his new wife Rosamund. Bellow readily acknowledges that this part of the novel was lifted pretty directly from his own life in 1994. "I was in St. Martin, and I went to a little French restaurant. I said, 'Do you have any local catch?' thinking that I'd outsmart the frozen-fish scene. But it didn't work, because it is the inland fish, the reef feeders, who get these poisons." Thanks to Freedman's quick thinking...