Tough love

calendarlive.com: Tough love: "In an essay on Saul Bellow's 'Ravelstein,' which many readers and reviewers took as a portrait of Bellow's relationship with his old friend Allan Bloom, she writes: 'When it comes to novels, the author's life is nobody's business. A novel, even when it is autobiographical, is not an autobiography.' And: 'Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.' "