SOURCE: Tandon, Bharat. “Boswell on Gatsby.” Times Literary Supplement (21 April 2001): 21.

In the following unfavorable review, Tandon asserts that Ravelstein does not live up to its potential and that the book fails to captivate readers.

When is a choice not a choice? This is a question which Saul Bellow's fiction has pursued with dedication and ferocity for over half a century. As early as Dangling Man (1944), his perception of the ironies of enforced leisure in a time of military purposefulness—“the derangement of days, the levelling of occasions”—made that novel so much more than the demotic Chicago Camus it could easily have been. And in later works, many with titles which now sound like landmarks in post-war American fiction, he has continued to explore the range of what constitutes human choice, always aware that one cannot avoid being enmeshed with the wills and desires of others, but that...