The Actual

Like other later short works, this is a little gem. Bellows account of an old and futile love is full of the kinds of regrets and second guessing that goes with old age. Well worth a read and fully satisfying.

You can read this book in one sitting, and you likely will. I think Saul Bellow was nearly (or even beyond) 90 when he wrote this novella, and it does great damage to the notion that geriatric decline is inevitable. This book tells a very sentimental story without the slightest bit of sentimentality. I think this must be the hardest sort of novel to write, but Saul Bellow, as usual, makes it look easy.

A man moves back home to Chicago and into semi-retirement. We all have ghosts from our past, but Harry's ghosts, we come to understand, revolve around a lady he has known since junior high. As he reconciles himself to his past, and to these ghosts, Harry arrives gracefully, bravely, at the only logical conclusion there is for him. The journey there is pure poetry, and Bellow's work in the smaller novella form is a gift to us all. We need to cherish this book and learn its quiet, solid lessons. I read it twice straight through so I could savor its opening pages all the more.

In The Actual, Bellow touches on the major intellectual themes of the late twentieth century: materialism, capitalism, existentialism, nihilism, and postmodernism. Bellow once again, consciously or unconsciously, tells a great story placed in the philosophic world of actuality, where the individual, the particular, the personal triumphs over modernism's desire to subsume the part into the whole. Bellow uses the romantic genre to discuss these themes while flashing the caution light of pragmatism. A pragmatism that says existentialism can be nihilism, materialism creates numbness, captialism demands consumption, and love becomes a carnival unless anchored in the heart and objectified in an "other"