Saul Bellow’s latest novel is about an intellectual hothouse: scandal, sexual revelations-and the biggest-selling philosopher of our time.

When The Closing of the American Mind shot to the top of the best-seller list in 1987, one critic suspected an elaborate literary hoax. After all, here was a learned, cranky diatribe against liberal education, bristling with Oprah-proof chapter titles like “The Nietz-scheanization of the Left or Vice Versa,” and sporting an admiring foreword by none other than Saul Bellow-a clue, this critic proposed, that, while posing as a prickly polemic, the book was actually a novel, written in the voice of a “mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago” whom Bellow, ever mindful of his place in the literary pantheon, had given “the evocative name ‘Bloom.’” 

Now it seems this hunch was just premature. Bellow’s new novel, Ravelstein, due out at the end of April, is narrated by a man struggling to compose a posthumous memoir of the brilliant academic-cum-millionaire author Abe Ravelstein, a memoir commissioned by Ravelstein himself. And according to Bellow, this novel is the memoir requested by Allan Bloom, the late friend with whom he taught seminars on literature and philosophy at Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. 

Bellow is famous for filching details from the lives of his acquaintances, but the unflinching portrayal of Bloom-as-Ravelstein has stirred some controversy among their old colleagues. Before Ravelstein, no reference either to Bloom’s homosexuality or to the AIDS virus that allegedly killed him in 1992 had ever appeared in print. “Even if Allan said he wanted Saul to write about him,” says Werner Dannhauser; a close friend of Bloom’s who taught with him at Chicago and Cornell, “I don’t think that he would have wanted this ‘warts and all’ portrait to have contained every wart.” 

Some of Bloom’s students were impressed by the portrait’s detail. “Bellow really got Allan’s passionate quirkiness, especially the manic energy that kept him up all night discussing Rousseau with us,” says social theorist Francis Fukuyama. Bloom as subject: “Perhaps the best one I ever had.” 

It was Bloom’s passionate love of ideas that drew Bellow to him, and the University of Chicago’s intellectual milieu that enabled the collaboration to thrive. 

Dannhauser attended a few of the joint seminars. “It was a deep and intimate friendship. They were marvelous seminars in which Allan would ruminate on a novel’s philosophical aspects and Saul would explain what made it tick.” Ravelstein is a love letter to the university that nurtured both men and whose intellectual luminaries-Bloom’s mentor, political philosopher Leo Strauss; historian of religion Mircea Eliade; sociologist Edward Shils—are present in the book and among the most entertaining pseudonymous portraits Bellow has ever drawn. And yet Bellow himself has rarely entered one of his novels as nakedly as he does here, leaving himself without a fictional mask. 

Ravelstein‘s power as a novel is strengthened by its autobiographical roots: It is the notes of an 84-year-old man measuring his mortality against the death of his dearest friend. The final pages of Ravelstein tell of Chick/Bellow’s own brush with death when he eats a poisonous fish on the trop ical island where he has retreated to write his Ravelstein memoir. Although Chick survives, the novel ends on a melancholy note of longing—not just for Bloom but for the epic intellectual world he represents. “Ravelstein’s legacy to me was a subject,” says Chick, “perhaps the best one I ever had.” 

The partially paralyzed Bloom spent his last days dictating Love and Friendship, his meditation on Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Austen. When Bellow faced death, he wrote about Allan Bloom.