SOURCE: Yardley, Jonathan. “Bellow's Gift.” Washington Post Book World 30, no. 15 (9-15 April 2000): 1-2.

In the following review, Yardley contends that Ravelstein is less of a novel than a portrait of Bellow's friendship with the writer Allan Bloom.

It is by now common knowledge in literary and publishing circles that Saul Bellow's new book [Ravelstein], though it has the form of a novel, is in fact a memoir of his intellectual sparring partner and intimate friend Allan Bloom, who died several years ago at the age of 62. Bloom, who achieved notoriety and wealth late in life with the publication of The Closing of the American Mind, was in some respects an unlikely object of Bellow's most heartfelt affections. Yet theirs was a rich friendship, out of which—and as a memorial to which—Bellow has fashioned a rich, loving and affecting book, his first full-length novel since More Die...