The Actual

Starred review from April 28, 1997
"A man's road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile, for that is what a personal history amounts to--exile." So says Harry Trellman, the narrator of the Nobel laureate's latest work, who is by any measure an exile several times over. Trellman's ailing mother and hardworking father consigned him to an orphanage; shady business dealings kept him in the Third World for most of his adulthood. Over the years, his high-school sweetheart, the only woman he ever loved, has grown old in the arms of other men. Now in late middle age, Trellman has returned to the Chicago of his youth to recover what he can of the life that has passed him by. A kind of an affectionate, latter-day "Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," this novella nevertheless carries distinguishing Bellow trademarks: the mythically cosmopolitan, clubby Chicago where bankers quote Hamlet and intellectuals stumble into wealth; the Emersonian turns of phrase ("`Distance' is a formality. The mind takes no real notice of it") grounded in Yiddish earthiness ("He's got a condom over his heart"); and, deeper than these, Bellow's passionate eroticism, wherein, in order to get at the "actual" beloved, one must survive sex, transgression, divorce and menages a trois, whether of the body or the spirit. Bellow is a conservative in the best sense: he calls his readers constantly back to what they can't help but believe, at the same time insisting, as Trellman puts it, on a common recognition "that the powers of our human genius are present where one least expects them." As usual in Bellow's more recent fiction, plot is secondary here. So is character, for the hero of this small love-story is character itself.