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For all the love and admiration that Chick lavishes on Ravelstein, he also notes some of their deep disagreements on fundamental matters. Ravelstein, the brilliant teacher of classical philosophy and political theory, thinks Chick's artistic temperament as a writer of fiction represents a refusal to grow up and grapple with the real world of public affairs: "Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopt rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics." Chick responds, "His severity did me good," but adds, "I had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with."
The exchanges between Chick and Ravelstein cover a broad array of eternal questions, including, inevitably, death and the possibility of an afterlife. But the novel reads like the antithesis of abstractions. Ravelstein brims with life thanks to Chick's, that is, Bellow's, comic observations on the passing scene. Here are French waiters "working like acrobats" at a dinner Ravelstein throws for Chick at an exclusive Paris restaurant. Here is Chick on Ravelstein's notoriously messy eating habits: "An experienced hostess would have spread newspapers under his chair." Here is Ravelstein amused, laughing "like Picasso's wounded horse in Guernica, rearing back." Such indelible impressions are the stuff of art, not gossip.
Late in the novel, after Ravelstein's death, Chick himself nearly dies after eating a bad red snapper during a Caribbean vacation with his new wife Rosamund. Bellow readily acknowledges that this part of the novel was lifted pretty directly from his own life in 1994. "I was in St. Martin, and I went to a little French restaurant. I said, 'Do you have any local catch?' thinking that I'd outsmart the frozen-fish scene. But it didn't work, because it is the inland fish, the reef feeders, who get these poisons." Thanks to Freedman's quick thinking in an emergency, Bellow was flown back to Boston and landed in intensive care. Rumors at the time had him near death. "It took me a couple of years to come back from that," he says. Any lingering effects? "Yes, I sometimes trip while walking, and I may fall down. My coordination is not what it used to be. Whether it's my age by this time or whether it's the toxin, I can't tell."
Death is on Bellow's mind often, he acknowledges, but not simply because he is 84. "I started thinking seriously about death when my mother died, when I was 17 years old." He left Chicago in 1993 "because so many of my friends had died, and wherever I went, I was reminded of them. So I thought, Well, I'll go to a place where I had no dead acquaintances or friends."
That turned out to be Boston and B.U., where he still teaches and still enjoys students. "Some don't know anything," he says. "They don't know how to write at all. Some, however, almost the same percentage as earlier, speak well, write well, are intelligent, read closely, are sympathetic." He adds, "I was curious as to whether TV had driven literature into some hole in the ground. I don't think so."