[In the following review, LaHood offers a laudatory assessment of The Actual.]

Saul Bellow can write. He has a Nobel Prize (1976) to show for it. He is also the only novelist to win three National Book Awards—for The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). Add to these laurels a Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift (1975) and the National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters (1990), and he is probably America's most decorated author. Would such a revered and honored author risk all on a novella? The answer is yes.

The Actual is hardly a risk, however. It is pure Bellow. It is the brilliant first-person narrative of Harry Trellman, a Chicago intellectual, who has been in love with Amy Wustrin, his high-school sweetheart, for forty years, but has never claimed her for his own. It takes an aged billionaire, Sigmund Adletsky, to get them together at the end. Trellman is a memorable Bellow protagonist, mainly because his novella-long self-analysis is so trenchant. Of his friends and acquaintances he says: “These were all commonplace persons. I would never have let them think so, but it's time to admit that I looked down on them. They were lacking in higher motives. They were run-of-the-mill products of our mass democracy. … But although I had such feelings and made such judgements, I couldn't rid myself of the habit of watching for glimpses of higher capacities and incipient powerful forces.”

This is not just Trellman's mature insight but also Bellow's. And what are the “higher capacities” that Bellow sees in the human race after a lifetime of most careful observation? They are exemplified in Trellman. It is his astuteness in observing people that catches Adletsky's eye and causes him to bring Trellman in close to him. The other higher capacity in Bellow's vision of humanity is our ability to love, even though we often do it clumsily and ineffectively. Trellman has loved Amy always, yet has seldom seen her, and never courted her after high school. He says of their relationship: “It now becomes clear … that I had been in daily contact with Amy, year in, year out, getting support from her in imaginary consultations.”

In their conversations at the end of the story, while exhuming and reburying her ex-husband, just before Trellman finally proposes, he tries to explain this feeling to Amy by calling it “an actual affinity.” She replies: “You never did have any use for the way other people spoke, or speak. Everything has to be translated into your own language. But what made it actual?” He answers: “Other women might remind me of you, but there was only one actual Amy.”

This is a very romantic ending for an eighty-two-year-old author to have conceived. But it is pure Bellow, great Bellow. Our minds and our hearts, properly used, are what being human is all about. Perhaps The Actual is Bellow's last acknowledgment of this.