Ravelstein

Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, his final novel, was published in 2000. Bellow was eighty-five years old and it received widespread critical acclaim. Ravelstein tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death. The novel is a roman à clef written as a memoir. The narrator is in Paris with Abe Ravelstein, and Ravelstein, who is dying, asks the narrator to write a memoir about him after he dies.

After his death, the narrator and his wife go on holiday to the Caribbean. The narrator catches a tropical disease and flies back to the United States to convalesce.

Eventually, on recuperation, he decides to write a memoir, which turns out to be Saul Bellow's Ravelstein.