“It should not be so goddamn hard,” my old man shrieked, “to communicate — !” Fall of 1993. I was 14 years old and the two of us were no longer simpatico. My father had blown his top, overnight gone from a complacent, kindly, eminently decent and beloved schoolteacher to an animal boiling with rage. No one had expected it, and no one had had time to ask why.
Twenty years ago, the year of Saul Bellow’s death, I chanced upon an unusually clean copy of Ravelstein in a ramshackle bookstall in New Delhi. India is an unexpected place to wind up reading, for the first time, this midcentury urban intellectual, comic dissector of America’s moronic inferno. But, as it happens, amidst the street chaos and the tiresome pressures of train travel and seedy hostels, I found that my irked, overstimulated soul was peculiarly receptive to the master’s comforting genius. I consumed the book in a couple of hours at a restaurant counter.