SOURCE: Fitzgerald, Penelope. “When I Am Old and Gay and Full of Sleep.” Spectator (15 April 2000): 43-4.

In the following review, Fitzgerald proclaims Ravelstein a novel about friendship.

Old age, on the whole, is not a time to be recommended, but very old novelists are allowed to write about what they like and at the age of 85 Saul Bellow [in Ravelstein] is interested in illnesses and their recent treatment and patients who are ‘blindly recovery-bent, who have the deep and special greed of the sick when they have decided not to die’. If they have things left to do, that will be a way of keeping themselves alive.

His Mid-Western narrator is Chick, Old Chick, an unassuming scribbler with Bellow's own familiar, puzzled, confiding, deeply beguiling voice, talking half to us, half to himself. He has undertaken to write a memoir of his younger friend, Professor Abe Ravelstein, a...