SOURCE: Leonard, John. “A Closing of the American Kind.” Nation 270, no. 21 (29 May 2000): 25-30.

In the following review, Leonard contends that it is the differences—not only the friendship—between Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom that animate Ravelstein.

You will recall that when Augie March went to Mexico, he hooked up with an eagle, which he called Caligula. (He also ran into Leon Trotsky, navigating “by the great stars.” In this, Augie was luckier than his creator, Saul Bellow, who had an appointment in 1940 to see Trotsky on the very morning of his murder and ended up in Coyoacán looking at a corpse: “A cone of bloody bandages was on his head. His cheeks, his nose, his beard, his throat, were streaked with blood and with dried iridescent trickles of iodine.” But already I digress.) Suppose that instead of an eagle, Augie had grabbed a parrot, like a...