At 84, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow has produced a new novel as lively and engaging as any of his previous books. Like Humboldt’s Gift, which is a fictionalized portrait of the poet Delmore Schwartz, Ravelstein reportedly is based on the life and death of another of Bellow’s great friends, the political philosopher Allan Bloom, who became a worldwide celebrity with his own book, Closing of the American Mind.

A brilliant thinker, Abe Ravelstein is a true original, who embraces life with equal measures of Dionysian and Apollonian gusto. When his novelist friend, Chick, suggests he write a book for a popular audience, they are both surprised when it makes millions. Already accustomed to living large, the newly wealthy Ravelstein rewards Chick with a trip to Paris. Once ensconced in the opulent Hotel Crillon, Ravelstein surprises Chick with the request that the novelist write his biography.

Chick resists, but the idea sparks his voluminous memories of the intellectual sparring the two men have enjoyed. For many years, their diverging philosophies on everything from love, sex, mortality, history, and what it means to be a Jew, have inspired countless animated conversations, often punctuated with old vaudeville routines and off-color jokes. When Chick discovers that Ravelstein is dying of AIDS, the urgency of the appeal to write a memoir plagues the novelist. But until he has his own brush with death, Chick cannot begin to keep his promise to his departed friend.

As he ponders his course, Chick conjures up the wild details of Ravelstein’s eccentric life and the inextricable part he, himself, has played in it. Again and again, Chick returns to Ravelstein’s endorsement of Plato’s suggestion that man is incomplete, always searching for his missing half. This becomes the central point of the novel that these two men truly were each other’s missing half. Ravelstein shares similarities with Humboldt’s Gift, particularly its freewheeling first person narrative, which avoids linear chronology and ricochets with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of intellectual ideas and cultural references. But with Bellow, nothing is random, and it adds up to an all-encompassing, loving elegy for a friendship without equal. Caustic, compassionate, and philosophical, this is a book that only Bellow could have given us.

Laurie Fox has managed to turn what could have been a harrowing and depressing autobiographical novel into a moving and funny story. Her style is brisk and readable. The bare facts are these: Lorna Person is born in 1952 to a suburban Los Angeles family. Her father works for TV, her mom is a housewife, and her sister, two years older, is mentally ill. Everyone does the best they can but there isn’t much left over emotionally for Lorna. Lonnie, the older sister, can’t be neatly diagnosed. She is masculine, violent, obsessed with the macabre. She is the creature from the black lagoon utterly miscast as a member of a sunny suburban family. Lonnie is sent from one special school to another but always comes back home again, wearing the family out with her rages and accusations.

Lorna excels at sweet and Lonnie excels at tough, says their mother. Lorna loves Peter Pan, ballet, books, drawing, and dolls. Imagine the scene when the two sisters play school with their dolls. Lorna wants a civilized school where her dolls line up quietly in their best clothes and draw pretty pictures. Lonnie brings in a gang of mutant monkey dolls and violent creatures to which she has added extra arms and legs and swollen heads. Lock up your daughters, bellows Lonnie, it’s time to rape and plunder Dolltown. Lorna’s best doll is stripped, kidnapped, and held hostage in her sister’s room until Lorna promises to treat freaks with respect. Amazingly, as the family lurches along through the 1950s and 1960s, Lorna not only treats her bizarre sister with respect, but with love. Lorna understands the rules of family disengagement early on and is helped out considerably by her rich and creative inner life. In high school, she finds her niche as an actress. On one memorable occasion when Lorna is a teenager, her TV executive father takes her to a hush-hush live taping of the Dave Clark Five. It’s 1966 and this British rock ‘n’ roll band is hot. Lorna not only watches the show but talks to one of the band members at the Hollywood Palace. Afterward she says, Daddy, the music was great. But these guys, they’re just guys. I thought they’d be special. When it comes time for college, Santa Cruz is the place for the artsy Lorna. Her parents finally divorce and her sister finds some stability in a Bakersfield half-way house. Her emotional life isn’t any easier, but Lorna is learning that she can cope, that she has coped, and that she isn’t responsible for everyone else. And that love has been with her all along. Fox steps back from a formidable childhood to write about painful issues with clarity and wit. Baby-boomers will enjoy this book, and it will bring hope to any despairing adolescent of today. Elisabeth Sherwin lives in Davis, California, where writes Printed Matter, a weekly column on books and writers.

Within the first two paragraphs of A Spring of Souls by William Cobb, the author makes it palpably clear that you are in the world of the South. Although set against the warm familiarity of orange earth and kudzu, Cobb’s Piper, Alabama, could be any modern-day place, plagued by violence, political extremism, and the disconnect between parents and children. His creation is a timeless town filled with characters as peculiar as they are plentiful. The events of the book, too, seem jarring but familiar at the same time, and so the reader is hooked from the beginning, trusting that whoever and whatever appears, the ride through the pages will be worth the pleasure in itself.

A Spring of Souls revolves around the life of Brenda Boykin, a strong and believable focus for depicting redemption in these troubling American times. Our heroine returns to the small town she left behind soon after high school. Dizzying and funny, disturbing and comforting, her return signals something phenomenal. She and her fellow characters children, lost loves, peers, local law enforcement make simple decisions and cosmic mistakes, all of which provide a momentum that is compelling to see through to the end. It reads a bit like a thinking person’s tabloid full of passion and violence, opposing opinions on social and political issues, clashing classes and broken dreams but deconstructed to the point of credibility all the way.

Cobb uses more graphic depictions in some of the story’s events to elicit an emotional response as well as tell the tale. His gift for storytelling becomes more evident with each new character introduced into the scenes of Wembly County, where the ever-widening sphere of the mystical realm meets stark reality. Like a Mount Olympus or Valhalla, the geographical area of the book is home to people of lasting and powerful strengths and frailties, their actions seeming to be the sum of human evolution as well as those of individuals stumbling along the path of human experience. What you take away from this story may indicate how sure-footed you are. ¦ Fran Hatton is a freelance writer and editor working in Indianapolis, Indiana.

It is the summer of 1998, and while the Clinton/Lewinsky affair is smeared across the headlines, a more intriguing scandal is unfolding in a small New England college town. Coleman Silk, dean of Athena College, has been forced to retire because of spurious charges of racism. When his wife has a heart attack, Silk rails against his accusers for causing her death. In an act of emotional rehabilitation, he then initiates an affair with a much younger, illiterate woman, and once again is castigated by the sanctimonious community.

This is the scenario around which Philip Roth masterfully constructs his new novel, The Human Stain. But while a less experienced (or less talented) novelist might have felt that unraveling the events and consequences of the scandal were enough, Roth has a lot more on his mind. He pulls an unexpected ace from his sleeve about a quarter of the way through the book, letting readers in on a startling secret. The truth about Coleman Silk, which not even his wife knew, throws an ironic light on the charges of racism, and in one stroke pushes the story beyond a mere indictment of a witch hunt. With the turn of a page, the book becomes a study in the price of personal pride, a powerful statement about racism and identity in America, and a tragedy that transcends the personal and stains us all.

The Human Stain is the final book in a loosely connected trilogy of novels about postwar America that Roth has produced over the last four years. The first book of the group, American Pastoral, won the Pulitzer Prize; the second was I Married a Communist. These recent novels are clearly the work of an older writer wrestling with large issues, and though they lack the quirky humor that established Roth as a popular writer back in the ’60s, they stretch his literary achievement in directions one might not have imagined, back when Portnoy’s Complaint was causing a small scandal of its own.

A book both to savor and to ponder, The Human Stain will speak to anyone who has watched with bafflement as civility and geniality have been systematically drained from our cultural dialogue.

Our Fathers is a dense, literate novel set in Scotland. This comes as no surprise since its author, Andrew O’Hagan, is himself a Scotsman and was named Scottish Writer of the Year in 1998.

James Bawn is the narrator, a 35-year-old man traveling from Liverpool to see his dying grandfather in Ayrshire county. Though his father was an angry, abusive alcoholic, his father’s father was a successful socialist politician whose grand vision and equally grand speaking voice made high-rise apartment buildings a postwar seaside reality. Granda was a priest of steel decking and concrete. But now the buildings are being demolished, and the old man also suffers decline. He rails at everyone who will listen, and often on the balcony to those who don’t. Granda always wanted the world to hear him. This book gives voice to Granda, towering over his son and grandson, as the buildings he saw erected towered over the village’s past.

James credits his current life to having had a childhood which was dotted with lucky islands, chief among them being his mother, his books, and his grandparents.

Of his mother, he writes of meeting her frequently after her morning shift in the bakery to share fresh baked buns, a respite from anger in the house.

James retreated into books, only to be told by his screaming father that books were only good for boring bastards who don’t know how to enjoy themselves. His grandparents, to whom he fled when he could no longer endure his father’s alcoholic rages, gave him room to live. They also gave him stories of the family’s past, including that of his grandfather’s mother, who led rent-strikers during World War I in a battle against slumlords.

O’Hagan is a lyrical writer, whose poetic turn of phrase creates an unforgettable image with a minimum of words.

Our fathers were made for grief. And all our lives we waited for sadness to happen . . . We had only the prospect of living in their wake . . . O’Hagan speaks for many of us as he concludes, Maybe there is no such thing as an ordinary trip home. ¦ George Cowmeadow Bauman is the co-owner of Acorn Books in Columbus, Ohio.