The Actual, by Saul Bellow, Viking, 103pp, £12.99 in UK
That life invariably adds up to a series of messy situations is no secret to any of Saul Bellow's increasingly wised-up narrators. The wisdom that comes with experience and regret became central to the master's work as long ago as Herzog (1964) and Mr Sammler's Planet (1972), and, following his 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature, continued on through The Dean's December (1982) and the subtle lament, More Die of Heartbreak (1986).
Late, late Bellow, which began with A Theft (1989), and continued superbly the same year with The Bellarosa Connection, is developing into a significant body of work, judging by his latest work, The Actual. The only difference between early late Bellow and late late Bellow is that the works have become, and appear set to remain, very short.
Bellow retains his fascination with humanity, our little mistakes, our weaknesses, our griefs and regrets - above all, our memories. His prose is still tough and muscular, as streetwise as it is lyric. Existence and its multiple complexities have always featured at the heart of Bellow's dense, heaving work, and therein lies its genius.
Most would agree that for a writer whose first novel, Dangling Man, was published in 1944, he has demonstrated remarkable artistic consistency, never mind stamina. The Actual is little more than a hundred pages and so engaging, or entrapping, is the narrator's tough, world-weary, knowing voice, that it is vital to stay alert and listen.
Harry Trellman is a typical Bellow thinker whose language combines the formal elegance of the philosopher with the terseness of a gangster. He's an observer, an outsider, and almost, but not quite, a loser. Too clever to be happy, he nevertheless has never given up hope. This in itself is admirable, considering Harry spent his childhood in an orphanage because of his mother's illnesses, while his carpenter father was at work. Then there's Harry appearance; Bellow has always been good on faces and Harry has an odd one. He looks Chinese: "a pair of fat black eyes, a wide mouth with a sizeable lip. Wonderful materials for the insidious Fu Manchu look."
Somewhere in the back of his mind, behind all the memories and the information he keeps stored up, is his heart busily keeping alive the essence of a romance that almost was. Memories are important to Harry; they have sustained him. His dreams of Amy Wustrin, the lost high school love of their mutual youth, have never quite faded. She, meanwhile, has made her own messes, including marrying Jay, Harry's best friend, a ruthless divorce lawyer as well as a womanising liar who betrayed her repeatedly before later humiliating her in the divorce courts.
Amy is large, soft, womanly, no longer young, but still a looker and none too pleased when Harry fails to recognise her. Still, as he points out, "the thick, dried urban gumbo of dark Lake Street made everything look bad". Although Bellow tends to try to bring his women alive through detailed descriptions of their faces, their bodies, their scent, also noted is their heroism: think of wise, loving Sorella in The Bellarosa Connection, for example. In The Actual, one divorced wife, only mentioned in passing, is recalled as standing by her drunken exspouse as he disgraces himself at a party: "She took her stand behind the uncontrollable former husband's chair, making a silent statement of despair, militancy, loyalty . . . a character of great price."
Harry's knowledge of oriental art earns him the favour of billionaire Sigmund Adletsky, himself as wise as a Sphinx. "He is very old now and small," says Harry, "light enough to fly away into the everlasting." The billionaire's equally ancient wife is also feather-light: "Amy couldn't see frail old Mrs Adletsky in the crimson Jacuzzi - she'd be swept away."
"I've always been a fairly hard judge of people," Harry says, but it obvious, for all his remoteness, that he is tougher on himself than on others: "I myself would be reluctant to trust a man who spoke as I did." At no time does he ask for mercy or understanding. Harry sees himself as no better than anyone else, and as he is clearly not surrounded by angels, he has no illusions about anyone else, either.
The humour of the book is almost eased past the reader. The Adletskys, tiny and each approaching one hundred, are keen to buy a luxury apartment from Bodo Heisinger, who has re-married the crazy lady who has served time for trying to have him murdered and now wants to sell the apartment as a way of paying off her accomplice. Amy, a muted version of one of Bellow's most complete creations, the ample, well-intentioned, brash Clara Velde of A Theft, has been employed to evaluate its garish contents.
Meanwhile she has another task to do, that of exhuming the coffin of her dead ex-husband who is occupying the grave long intended for her father, now soon to die. Being buried beside the mother-in-law who always hated him is just another of Jay's little jokes. It is also a way of ensuring that people continue to talk about Jay: being the centre of attention was always life's blood to him. Intent on defying death, old Adletsky assumes the role of matchmaker, despatching Harry to assist Amy at the cemetery. Some of the best exchanges are between Harry and Amy.
Harry knows his theorising had from the beginning come between himself and Amy. In many ways The Actual is a review of the truth, the truth being life as actually lived, not imagined. Even at his most cerebral, his most robustly philosophical, Bellow has never compromised either his honesty or his humanity. Pitting this brief book against established classics such as Humboldt's Gift (1975), Herzog (1964) or Bellow's masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), may seem unrealistic, yet The Actual, while not the best of Bellow, is still too good, too sharply observed for most writers to even dream of matching. Harry Trellman, poised at the eleventh hour to finally seize the day emotionally, announces: "we are, for the time being, the living, maimed and defective." So we all are, and Saul Bellow is the writer/ philosopher who has most clearly explored and understood and continues to understand the confusions of the soul and of the heart.