SOURCE: Nichols, David K. “On Bellow's Ravelstein.” Perspectives on Political Science 32, no. 1 (winter 2003): 14-21.

In the following essay, Nichols deems Ravelstein a book about ideas, contending that “the biggest mistake that reviewers make is their failure to appreciate both the political and intellectual weight” of the novel.

Saul Bellow has written Ravelstein as a tribute to Allan Bloom, who died in 1992, a teacher and philosopher most famous for his 1987 critique of education in The Closing of the American Mind. However, the inevitable speculation about the correspondence between Bloom the man and Ravelstein the character, or between Chick the narrator and Bellow the author, ironically may have distracted the audience from the text. Bellow has given us and given Bloom a story, and it is a story that deserves to be taken seriously. Chick begins: “Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is...