It 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 title character, Ravelstein, is based on the philosopher Allan Bloom, who taught alongside Bellow at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought.

Remembering Bloom in an interview, Bellow said, "Allan inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air.

"[6] The literary theorist John Sutherland wrote: "The novel explores, in its attractively rambling way, two dauntingly large and touchy themes: death and American Jewishness.

"[7] The literary critic Sir Malcolm Bradbury stated: "Just when we didn't expect it, there now wonderfully comes a large new novel from the master.

Those who invite him to dinner must reckon with 'the spilling, splashing, crumbling, the nastiness of his napkin after he had used it, the pieces of cooked meat scattered under the table'.

... a novel Bellow wrote in his 80s, which I found absolutely, irresistibly seductive, both sensually and intellectually, one in which the sublimity and pathos of life and art are not joined to each other with heavy welds but transformed into a beautiful, seamless, unravelable fabric.

"[8] On its publication, the Harvard literary critic James Wood wrote: "How extraordinary, then, that Bellow's substantial new novel, Ravelstein, written in his 85th year, should be so full of the old, cascading power.

His apartment is stuffed with beautiful glass and silverware, with the finest Italian and French linens, and thousands of CDs.

He reclines on a black leather couch, listening to Baroque music, is enormously learned, and given to oration on a thousand subjects.

"[9] On its publication, the novel caused controversy[10] because of its frank depiction of Ravelstein's (and therefore Allan Bloom's) love of gossip, free spending, political influence, and homosexuality, as well as the revelation, as the story unfolds, that he is dying from AIDS.

As the journalist Robert Fulford pointed out: "Remarkably, no reference to Bloom's homosexuality has previously appeared in print — not in the publicity that surrounded his best-seller, or his obituaries, or even his posthumously published book, Love and Friendship.

Bloom was not a "closeted" homosexual: although he never spoke publicly of his sexual orientation, he was openly gay, and his close friends, colleagues, and former students all knew of it.

The reason he disliked the modern cult of easy sex was not because he scorned or feared the erotic life, but because he revered it.

He is a consumer of goods and gossip, eagerly meeting people where they exist, without constructing artificial barriers based on presumed superiority.

[citation needed] In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of Ravelstein, narrated by Peter Ganim, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks.