Saul Bellow's status as one of America's great writers has overshadowed the fact that he hasn't really written a long work for nearly two decades. It took the death of a close friend to inspire a new book, but Ravelstein is only barely a work of fiction. A touching and intelligent elegy for his eccentric friend Allan Bloom (here renamed Abe Ravelstein), the novel plumbs Bellow's most personal territory. The book begins in Paris, where Ravelstein is living extravagantly off the earnings of his international bestseller (a popular manifesto modeled after The Closing Of The American Mind). Ravelstein has approached narrator Chick (Bellow's alter ego) to write his biography, but he can't quite keep still long enough to relay the facts of his life. Instead, the interaction between the two does Chick's work for him, the pair's coded language and discussions of the classics, Judaism, fascism, philosophy, and shared experiences offering a vivid portrait of a unique and lasting friendship. When Ravelstein returns to the Midwestern campus where he teaches, he's waylaid with AIDS-related illnesses, and Chick considers the discussed biography less and less: It's as if finalizing Ravelstein's life in words would finalize his death in the real world, as well. Through anecdote after anecdote, the reader learns how much Ravelstein means to Chick (especially after Chick's divorce, Ravelstein's demise, and Chick's own near-death experience), and in turn how much Bloom must have meant to Bellow. The two were vastly different people, the former brash and impulsive and the latter careful and neurotic, but they each offered something to the other that neither had himself. With the economy of a master, Bellow relates the minutiae of a friendship in such pointed detail that Ravelstein's larger-than-life figure is made familiar to the reader, too.