SOURCE: Levi, Jonathan. “Tabletalk.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (23 April 2000): 16.

In the following review, Levi discusses the insights and revelations found in Ravelstein.

Ever since the publication of the Inferno, in which Dante betrayed his beloved teacher Brunetto Latini to an unsuspecting public by casting him among the Sodomites, outing your dead friends (especially those with tenure) has become a literary genre unto itself.

Saul Bellow (whose current colleagues include Dante translator Robert Pinsky) is the latest practitioner with the appearance of his twelfth novel. Ravelstein, a roman-à-clef about his friendship with the late Allan Bloom (a former colleague), who wrote the bestselling, conservative masterwork The Closing of the American Mind, before joining Ser Brunetto in the afterlife.

And yet the drama of Ravelstein is no more of the tabloid variety than is Canto XV of the Inferno. The schadenfreude certain bored insiders might feel at revelations...