SOURCE: Hitchens, Christopher. “The Egg-Head's Egger-On.” London Review of Books (27 April 2000): 21-3.

In the following review, Hitchens provides a thematic analysis of Ravelstein and calls the book “a novelistic and realistic memoir” of the late author Allan Bloom.

Novelists can be lucky in their editors, in their friends, in their mentors and even in their pupils. Sometimes they are generous or sentimental enough to fictionalise the relationship. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell gave his friendless, dowdy and self-pitying protagonist Comstock one true pal: the editor and patron Ravelston, proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston—some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry—was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow—who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful Humboldt's Gift—now...