Customer Reviews

The Actual

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While there is little disputing Saul Bellow's remarkable gifts at capturing reality and creating amazingly dense and believable characters, I find it a bit disheartening to believe that this truly gifted writer has grown trite in his old age. Without giving it away, the ending to this novella is simply devastating. All of the depth and beauty of this story is lost, for me, in one line. I find it equally dissappointing to discover the Saul Bellow suffers from, what I like to refer to as, the Fitzgerald syndrome. That is to say that the main characters in all his stories seem to be, roughly, the same person. Harry Tellman, in this story, seems to be Eugene Henderson (the Rain King) and Tommy Wilhelm ("Seize the Day") revisited. My recommendation, read the story, because it is quite good, just skip the last line.

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 this novella by Pulitzer Prize- and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, obsession and denial are key ideas that inhabit a story without much forward momentum or plot. Harry Trellman, the first-person narrator, is Jewish but looks Chinese - a detail of his appearance that is revisited again and again for no truly discernable reason other than to illustrate how much of an outsider Harry is to everyone around him, including himself. In fact, physical appearance takes up much of the non-dialogue description, with every one of the sparse number of characters identified repititiously by similar, if not exactly replicated, specifics of physiognomy. It happens so frequently, in a barely-hundred-page book, that it seems Bellow must be after some deeper meaning, must have some compelling reason to continuously describe his spare cast. Whatever the reason, I think I missed it, so instead of striking my reader's eye as profound, the technique became distracting, and finally irritating at a certain point.

The book starts out strongly, introducing a fairly enigmatic character in Harry, and even pretends for a moment to have an intriguing story at the point the narrator meets billionaire Sigmund Adletsky for a wary, suspicion-bent tete-a-tete. But by page seventeen, Harry's association with the old moneybags is done and the focus shifts to Amy Wustrin, whose story carries practically the next third of the novel. She is an old flame of Harry's, a woman he has never forgotten and who he continues to pine over, to the point of creating daily conversations with her in his much-too-sharp, currently-unchallenged mind. The obsession slant is nice, but it never really develops further than fantasy and backstory, with a scene of confession that comes late and fails to deliver anything dramatic or climactic.

In all, there is nothing very exciting or tantalizing in the book, despite attempts to delve into Philip Roth-style, s#xually-graphic-prose territory that ultimately comes off as feeble and unimaginative. This is the first book of Bellow's that I have read -- and I do plan to read more, despite my extremely lukewarm reaction to this short work -- and far be it from me to slam a multiple-award winner, but the book as a whole struck me as a dud. The shift from Harry's p.o.v. to a sloppily constructed, and ill-advised narrative avenue into Amy's mind was Bellow's first misstep, followed by his abandonment of Harry's direct relationship with Adletsky's "brain trust" and finally, the excessive, mind-numbing attention paid to Amy's ex-husband's burial arrangements. The book takes off like a well-crafted and perfectly aimed bullet, careens into blunt storytelling practices, then ricochets irresponsibly off poorly constructed firmaments, managing to completely shred the narrative terrain. The bullet does its damage, then loses momentum and wedges into an endless scene between Amy and Harry that curtails its projected force prematurely, all without ever managing to hit its intended target.

I am a Bellow fan and have read 12 of his 13 novels, and created an amazon guide: "A Guide to Reading Saul Bellow."

In case you are new to Bellow, his novels reflect his life, his writings, and his five marriages during his five active decades of writing. He hit his peak somewhere around the time of "Augie March" in 1953 and continued through to the Pulitzer novel "Humbolt's Gift" in 1973. He wrote from the early 1940s through to 2000. His novels are written in a narrative form, and the main character is a Jewish male, usually a writer but not always, and he is living in either in New York or Chicago. Bellow wrote approximately 13 novels plus other works. Bellow progressed a long way as a writer over the five decades. This story was written near the end of his career in 1997 and is nothing like the early novels "Dangling Man" or "The Victim" written 50 years earlier. Those were heavy slow reads. "Dangling Man" is often boring, and Bellow was in search of his writing style in that period of the 1940s. The present novel is light reading, written in an easy to follow style and is just over 100 pages, barely more than a short story. It has some merit but it is a far cry from the brilliant writing of "Herzog" or the entertaining read "Humbolt's Gift."

What was surprising for myself was the very slow start to the book. The first 20 pages or so seem a bit aimless, and it is not until the central character Harry, a retired businesman re-unites with his teenage flame Amy Wustrin, that the story takes off. They meet by chance and work to help a Chicago millionaire and to look after the burial of Amy's dead husband. As in other Bellow novels, there is a lot of self examination and many recalls by Harry of past memories of the times that Amy and Harry spent together in their early years - decades earlier as teenagers.

The slow pace picks up in the second half and it has a surprise ending. To explain the title would be to explain the plot and surprise ending. It is an interesting read but definitely a notch or two below most of his other works.

This is an interesting Bellow read, but not the first that I would recommend by Bellow. It lacks the charm, the prose, and the complexity of some of his other novels written between 1950 and 1980.

Although Bellow (as usual) manages to navigate a perfect course through the nebulous region between material, modern life and the life of the mind, he leaves us with what I thought was a curious, romantic ending. Ironic as a wedding proposal at an ex's disinterment may be, I'm not sure how Trellman was finally able to participate outwardly in the emotional world he seemed able only to observe and catalog. There's certainly some value in understanding the meaning of this final puzzle in what is a rich, engaging read

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"

After reading all the other reviews below, I have to say I enjoyed the novella much more than they did. I would give it 3 1/2 stars if the system let me. Okay, it's not as substantial as Bellow's most famous novels, but he's such an observant writer with such a good sense of nuance, that I enjoyed the experience of reading it. His characterization of the aging but powerful billionaire Harry Adletsky makes us feel that we've known him all our lives. With just a few pencil strokes, Bellow brings to life an odd cast of characters who draw us into their odd world. On the surface it's a love story, but beneath, Bellow opens up worlds of social circles and offbeat human interactions that make this such an interesting read. I imagine that what Bellow likes best about the novella form is that it allows him to draw his plot and characters with just a few strokes while challenging him to make them life-like. I think he succeeds admirably.

This was the first work I've read by Bellow. Frankly, it was disappointing simply because his fame has so elevated my expectations in the first place. Reading all the formal and informal reviews after finishing the book myself was quite a revelation, too. For example, regarding how Harry finally came to be reunited with Amy, I had come to a very different conclusion from that of the authors of all the major reviews. I fount it quite strange that the reviewers all wrote that Harry got together with Amy through his association with the billionaire, Adletsky. But from page eighty-five, I clearly got the impression that Harry has been in touch with Amy and her family through the years and later recommended her to Adletsky, thus establishing her in the business of interior decorating.

This is just an example of how the relationships among the characters seem underdeveloped and ambiguous to me. I simply failed to perceive any depth of the story. And I agree with one of the reader-reviewers that the ending came as an unpleasant shock to me!

To be sure, the novella has a very distinct voice of its own. And its inventiveness would probably rank it above average on my scale. Maybe it just wasn't the ideal introductory work to appreciate Bellow's genius?

"The Actual" is a novella (104 pages long) by distinguished Nobel Prize winning writer Saul Bellow. The story is told in the first person by Harry Trellman, a semiretired Jewish businessman living in Chicago. His life is impacted by his relationships with two key characters: super-rich Sigmund Adletsky, a businessman who recruits Harry to be a sort of consultant, and Amy Wustrin, a divorcee with whom Harry shares a personal history that goes back a long time.

"The Actual" is a quirky look at Jewish life in Chicago. It's a tender, sad, but hopeful story about love, sex, loss, shame, marriage, divorce, death, and Jewishness.

Harry is a curious, but oddly likeable character--he's very much a self-conscious outsider with a secretive side. Bellow surrounds Harry with some colorful supporting characters. Bellow writes with a smooth, engaging prose style and ultimately brings this short tale to a very satisfying conclusion.

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.