SOURCE: Menand, Louis. “Bloom's Gift.” New York Review of Books (25 May 2000): 17-18.

In the following review, Menand argues that Ravelstein is a novel not only about friendship and mortality, but also focuses on the male heterosexual ego.

Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom were friends. They taught together at the University of Chicago, and Bellow wrote the foreword to Bloom's phenomenal best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, which came out in 1987. In spite of its popularity, The Closing of the American Mind was a quirky book. Many writers tried to imitate its success as a diatribe against American higher education, but very few tried to repeat its argument. For in many ways the book was a kind of personal fantasy—a contrarian reading of a handful of old philosophy texts offered as the explanation for the “relativism” of today's professors and the soullessness of today's youth, a...