‘Ravelstein’ Revisited

WHEN SAUL BELLOW’S RAVELSTEIN came out in 2000, some took it personally. The character Abe Ravelstein, a gay man who dies of complications from AIDS, was a thinly disguised Allan Bloom, Bellow’s friend, a professor of political philosophy and the author of the 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. In the runup to publication, Bellow told an interviewer that he wanted to “get [Bloom] down on paper.” Thus, Bellow non-fictionalized his fictionalized outing of Bloom.