On Saul Bellow’s 'Ravelstein'

All great books are in conversation with one another, often asking many of the same fundamental questions, sometimes suggesting roughly similar answers, and occasionally doing so with knowing winks across the centuries. Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile are two such books, and since the latter was written with the former firmly in view, it is not surprising that both grapple with the same daunting challenge: how to educate free human beings, particularly in the crucial business of discerning between appearances and reality.