Tag Archives: Saul Bellow

Books of 2021

Posted on by 2 comments

As 2021 draws to a close and this blog nears its first anniversary, I feel almost contractually obliged to do a round-up of my books of the year. So here we are: ten books, new and old (and ranked only by author surname), that I particularly enjoyed over the past twelve months. Not all of them I got round to reviewing, alas, but I include them here anyway for the sake of interest. I’d be keen to hear your picks.

Unfortunately, my copy of The Interest could not be located in time for the photoshoot.

David Baddiel – Jews Don’t Count
It is a testament to how well this book makes the case for Jewish inclusion in identity politics that I hesitate to even use so subjective and negotiable a phrase as ‘make the case’. That is, Baddiel marshals his evidence of Jewish discrimination so convincingly that I closed the book feeling that the case, too, was closed; that Jews aren’t counted and should be. A brilliantly argued polemic.

Saul Bellow – Ravelstein
In my quest to consume all of Saul Bellow, 2021 saw me read both his first novel, Dangling Man, and his last, Ravelstein. Though one is the work of a twenty-eight-year-old, the other that of an eighty-four-year-old, it is the latter that is the more vigorous, with passages as powerful as anything in Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift. Straight on the reread pile it goes.

Jonathan Coe – Mr Wilder and Me
There are many things to love about Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, but, for a Billy Wilder superfan like myself, it is its reclamation of the director’s little-seen but infinitely fascinating penultimate film Fedora that I loved most. A story about a faded star of the silver screen, Fedora is essentially a creaky rehash of Wilder’s own Sunset Boulevard, making it, for Coe, a sad reflection of where the director himself was at this point in his career, i.e. old, past-it and disillusioned with the film industry. But don’t let that put you off. Just as Wilder maintained his sense of humour to the end, so does Coe’s novel, which I devoured in two pleasurable sittings. No novel went down more easily this year.

Joshua Cohen – The Netanyahus
Who knew there was a rip-roaring comedy to be written about Israel’s first family? Who else could have written one but Joshua Cohen? As James Wood said in his review of Cohen’s previous novel, “his sentences are all-season journeyers, able to do everything everywhere at once. He can be witty, slangy, lyrical, ironic, vivid; he possesses leaping powers of metaphor and analogy […] his fiction displays the stretch marks of its originality.” The same – and then some – applies to The Netanyahus.   

Jude Cook – Jacob’s Advice
Though it couldn’t be more unlike a James Bond film, Jude Cook’s Jacob’s Advice gave this locked-down reader the same travel-by-proxy pleasures: of a main character flâneuring around a beautiful European city (Paris); of witty, alcohol-fuelled repartee; of a transnational romance with a preposterous age gap. Turns out I didn’t have to go abroad, after all; I just had to read Jacob’s Advice.

Iris Murdoch – The Bell
Having not enjoyed the picaresque of Under the Net, I was only persuaded to return to Iris Murdoch by the recent In Our Time episode on her. What a lesson in second chances! With its broad-church approach to sexuality and its sly send-up of middle-class mores, The Bell has as much to say now as it did when it was first published in 1958. I look forward to finding out whether her other novels hold up in 2022.

Gwendoline Riley – My Phantoms
Like Ravelstein, My Phantoms is a novel that puts all its eggs in the basket of character yet is as page-turning as a thriller. Proof, if proof were needed, that plot and character are not discrete elements of storytelling but are inextricable; that if you have characters as complex and interesting as the mother and daughter at the centre of My Phantoms, then that is all the plot you need.

Edward St Aubyn – Never Mind
I’ve read two more of the Patrick Melrose books since I read Never Mind, yet neither of them delivered quite such consistent pleasure as this first instalment. Never Mind is lean, clever and wonderfully outrageous, with characters you just love to hate.

Elizabeth Taylor – Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
There is an interesting connection between Elizabeth Taylor and one of the other authors on this list. In 1971, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was among the shortlisted novels for that year’s Booker Prize and the favourite of all the judging panel. All of them, that is, except Saul Bellow, who vetoed Mrs Palfrey on the grounds that it reminded him of “the tinkle of teacups” and insisted the prize go instead to V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State. Well, Bellow was wrong about that. Yes, there are teacups in Mrs Palfrey, but they don’t do anything so decorous as tinkle; they crash, break and slice your hand. That’s how sharp the writing is.

Michael Taylor – The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery
Of the many myths this important exposé of British slavery punctured, the most relevant one for my reading was the myth that history books are long, dry and dull. For Michael Taylor’s The Interest is none of these things and was read at great speed and with great fascination. I really must read more history. (I actually interviewed Michael about this book for the Berwick Literary Festival. You can view the conversation here.)

by George Cochrane

Saul Bellow – Ravelstein

Posted on by One comment

For as long as I’ve had this blog, I have been itching to write about Saul Bellow. No writer has influenced me more. At least, no writer has influenced my reading more. After three years studying the English canon, I finished my literature degree feeling rather canon-ed out and went through a period where I didn’t read very much. Bellow got me going again. Exactly why my parents had a copy of Humboldt’s Gift I (and they) don’t know. Nor do I know what moved me to read it. What I do know is that my folks aren’t getting their book back anytime soon. For me, that novel was so brimming with life, so electrically charged, that it completely re-energised my reading and set me off on a whole odyssey of American literature that I am still on. Naturally, there have been many more Bellows along the way, but I am only now getting around to his last novel, Ravelstein. It was worth the wait.

Image credit: Penguin

Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-four, Ravelstein is inevitably mellower than Herzog and Humboldt, less rambunctious. At 230-odd pages, it is also significantly shorter. Neither fact should surprise. Shorter and mellower was the direction in which Bellow’s fiction had been heading for a while, with stories that dwelt increasingly on the past, that weren’t always barrelling forward. Though it rarely receives attention, some great writing emerged from this period: the 1989 novella The Bellarosa Connection is up there with his best novels for me, and short stories like ‘Something to Remember Me By’ and ‘A Silver Dish’ are wonderfully moving. At 230-odd pages, then, Ravelstein is actually a lot longer than you might expect, and a whole lot more vigorous.

This late-career burst of energy is indebted to the novel’s subject, Abe Ravelstein, in whom Bellow found the perfect outlet for his talents. As with Humboldt’s eponymous poet, this maverick philosopher is seen through the eyes of another, Chick. Though Chick is considerably older than Ravelstein, the two are “close friends, none closer”: the former in awe of the latter’s dazzling intellect; the latter indebted to the former for convincing him to put his ideas down in a book. That book, remarkably, has become a bestseller, and when we meet our two characters in Paris at the beginning of the novel, Ravelstein is putting his newly acquired millions to good use, whirlwinding his friend around cafés, restaurants and boutiques. Ravelstein is in his element here and seems to practically crackle with energy:

Ravelstein scribbled his name wildly on the check while bringing a bun to his mouth. I was the neater eater. Ravelstein when he was feeding and speaking made you feel that something biological was going on, that he was stoking his system and nourishing his ideas.

This rapaciousness predates Ravelstein’s wealth; he has always been excessive, his engine-like body fizzing with so many ideas, so much talk, that his hands literally tremble with the stimulation.

People are understandably drawn to this force of nature. At the unnamed university where Ravelstein teaches (clearly Chicago), he is worshipped by his students,

who dressed as he did, smoked the same Marlboros, and found in [Ravelstein’s pizza-and-basketball parties] a common ground between the fan clubs of childhood and the Promised Land of the intellect toward which Ravelstein, their Moses and their Socrates, led them.

I share their fascination. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to say that Ravelstein is one of Bellow’s greatest creations, except that he is not Bellow’s creation. So clearly is the character modelled on Bellow’s close friend Allan Bloom that Ravelstein can sometimes read as straight biography. He has the same bald head as Bloom, wonderfully likened to a “honeydew melon”; he has the same gangly frame; and, of course, Bloom too was the author of an unlikely bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. And the Bloom connection means another thing: that Ravelstein cannot possibly end well. A homosexual, Bloom died of AIDS at the age of 62, and the same happens to his fictional self.

Knowing that he will die before his friend, Ravelstein canvasses Chick to write his biography:

Ravelstein’s legacy to me was a subject – he thought he was giving me a subject, perhaps the best one I ever had, perhaps the only really important one.

In a rather meta kind of way, Bloom gave Bellow a great subject, too, and were Philip Roth the author of this book, no doubt he would have had all sorts of postmodern fun with that. But this is Bellow writing, the least postmodern of authors, and what interests him is the human cost of this legacy: how Chick “may have nothing more to do in this life than commemorate [Ravelstein]”; how this “unfinished work” might be the only thing keeping him alive. These concerns become very real when, a few years after Ravelstein’s death and with the biography still not written, Chick eats a diseased fish while on holiday and almost dies. Having almost died of the same thing himself, Bellow is clearly writing from experience here and the last fifty or so pages of the novel give a breathless and convincing account of illness, from the first twinges of fatigue to the intervention of the life support machine.

Even so, I missed Ravelstein in these pages; he is barely mentioned, only reappearing in the last few. Bellow has written too strong a character to leave out. So let’s return to him for a moment. For me, Ravelstein’s appeal is Bellow’s appeal. “[J]ust as familiar with entertainers like Mel Brooks as with the classics,” Ravelstein too moves between the high and the low, pop culture and high culture, street talk and Socratic dialogue. For both Ravelstein and Bellow these things are one and the same, are all part of the human comedy, so that, even in a book full of death, there is more than enough life to keep you laughing.

by George Cochrane

Ravelstein is published by Penguin and is available here.

Jude Cook – Jacob’s Advice

Posted on by 3 comments

The idea of a Gentile convinced of his Jewishness was done (to death) by Howard Jacobson ten years ago in his wearisomely one-note The Finkler Question. Fortunately, the philosemitist in Jude Cook’s new novel, Jacob’s Advice, is not its main character and the book has many more ideas in its head than just that.

Its actual main character is the wannabe-Jew’s older cousin, Nicholas Newman – an historian of Revolutionary France. Nearing forty-five, Nick is in Paris for a year, ostensibly to work on a new book, but mainly to escape the problems waiting for him back in London. Those include an alimonious ex-wife, an increasingly estranged son and an accountant who has run off with all his money. The one thing he can’t leave behind is his health: a dodgy drug taken for “a prosaic urology-related problem” has resulted in a severe case of neuropathy and he is in near-constant pain. By way of distraction, Nick spends most of his time in the company of cousin Larry, also based in Paris, and one of the many pleasures of Cook’s novel is the repartee of these two characters: Nick chiding Larry for his twenty-year-old French girlfriend and his “Semitic infatuation”; Larry lecturing Nick on his financial and medicinal gullibility.

If this is all starting to sound a bit Saul Bellow, then I don’t think Cook would deny the influence. From its Humboldt’s Gift-esque title to its Herzog-ian narrative, Jacob’s Advice actually invites the comparison. Here is its first sentence:

My cousin, the well-known pharmacologist Larry Frost, always maintained his three favourite Americans were Jewish men: Bob Dylan, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen.

The Bellovian influence is even felt in the prose, which is impressively exuberant throughout. Sometimes too exuberant. Take this sentence from page three:

An eager, garrulous, indiscreet man with wild, dark curly hair and mobile (even manic) eyes the same colour as my own, [Larry] often appears shorter or squatter at a distance – as if he’s carrying a bit too much weight for his height.

There are one too many adjectives here, their collective music just one notch too loud. Thankfully, this superabundance of description is gradually tamed and the novel does quieten down.

It has to. Beneath its comic trappings lies real-life tragedy. Set in 2015, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack and the Hyper Cacher supermarket siege, the book depicts a Paris on edge, with armed police rarely out of frame and questions of discrimination rarely off people’s lips. An obvious Francophile, the author deserves credit for tackling so ugly a moment in France’s history – a moment that will chime with readers after the Black Lives Matter year we have just had.  

In such a moment, even Larry’s identity quest begins to make some sense – a tribe offers protection – and the novel becomes a surprisingly moving meditation on the idea of belonging. As with Bellow, the emotion sneaks up on you and there are some beautifully tender scenes towards the end, especially between Nick and his son. Here’s one:

The boy ran towards me, his arms outstretched. In seconds those arms were around my waist, my own legs palpitating. I pulled him closely into the folds of my coat in a tight embrace, my hand stroking his hair. He seemed so new, somehow, like a coin minted that morning. Looking down, he appeared to have shrunk, as if time had stopped, or gone backwards, since I last saw him.

With the tightening of the father’s embrace, so the prose tightens here, those dangling modifiers cleaving close to their parent clauses. The warm, parenthetical hug around “somehow” is also quite wonderful, blunting the rather sharp simile that follows and smoothing the passage from reality to metaphor.

Despite its intellectualism – and this is a deeply cerebral book – it is moments like this that stand out for me. Particularly now, when we are all starved of company, the pleasure of so interior a narrator as Nick escaping his self-absorption every once in a while and making a connection is a great one. A novel of both the head and the heart.

by George Cochrane

Jacob’s Advice is published by Unbound Books and is available here.