A very astute, very old Jewish trillionaire is counselled here [in The Actual] by an astute Jew, no longer young, no longer poor, who has resumed relations with a first, never forgotten love. For Harry Trellman, a businessman, an importer, Amy Wustrin is “the actual”. “Other women were apparitions” for this narrator. “She, and only she, was no apparition.” This is the centre of things in Saul Bellow's latest work of fiction. Not that there are all that many things for it to be the centre of. It is a short book—no different in kind from one of his long stories—and an oblique one. Are we to suppose, romantically, that only the first love matters? But its scenes from Chicago life are all of them worth hearing about.

Amy and Harry dated at high school, then drifted apart. She married Harry's friend Jay, a lawyer and pretender, one of those hustlers, gangsters and confidence men who stand close to the narrator or hero of Bellow's tales of mystery and imagination. He is a seducer of women, the sad emblem of an age of emancipation, according to the narrator, whose views on the subject are in line with those of Mr Sammler in the Bellow book of thirty years ago, a verdict on the space-travelling carnival 1960s; courteous, old-world Mr Sammler is given to reflections on the rise of the individual in the modern world, and on “the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone”, which has come about in his own time. Jay, who had chosen to be buried next to his hostile mother-in-law, is now due to be reinterred, in order to make room for his senile father-in-law. The story moves towards the transfer of the corpse, which is witnessed by Harry and his date from within the cocoon of the trillionaire Adletsky's limo. The scene suggests that Amy will live up to her promising first name.

Burials and reinterments are a thing of Saul Bellow's. In one of his stories, a woman wants to dig her husband up for a last look. “She said she just had to see him again.” Humboldt, in Humboldt's Gift, is climactically reinterred, together with his mother, in a cemetery scene which alludes to the necrophile raptures of the mother's-boy escapologist, Houdini. Saul Bellow is an Illinois Old Mortality whose taste “for graves can seem to incorporate a taste for escaping from them, and for the boundless beyond. In Mr Sammler's Planet, a novel much possessed by the idea of “earth-departure”, the “actual” is at one point equated with the eternal. This new reinterment bestows, however, no such thoughts on the remains of Jay Wustrin, who can sometimes look, from the dualistic point of view established in Bellow's earlier fictions, like Harry's lower self. Harry may be fit to rise, but no one would want to see Jay again.

“It is of course impossible to guess what people know about one another”, claims Trellman. It may not be possible to know what people know about one another, but it is surely possible to guess, as Trellman's opening sentences have already admitted, in conveying that it's easy to see what people think they're doing and not hard to make out what “they really are up to”. In the course of a Listener interview which appeared in 1969, Saul Bellow, in person, went so far as to remark that the individual “understands what is in his own heart, and in the hearts of others, somehow”. So what does Harry know, and what do we know about Harry? Is the importer an impostor? He says that he has been a dissembler, that he is secretive. Amy says that he lets on to no more than a tenth of what he “really thinks or, knows”. And he hasn't always been in a position to observe what he reports.

A key scene in the retailing of which Harry's powers as an observer are apparent, but from which he was absent in the flesh, ensues when wildfire Madge, who once took out a contract, no marriage contract either, on a husband who later remarried her, tips a cup of tea into Amy's thickly tweeded lap. The tea is spoken of as lukewarm and as scalding. The plant aloe vera is applied to the hurt. But Harry has to check with Amy later in the book: “Did Madge Heisinger really pour tea in your lap? Were you scalded?”

Old Adletsky, who maintains a think-tank or intelligence service, has hired him for the high quality of his gossip—for the higher gossip of which the novel itself appealingly consists. But we may sometimes wonder how much of this unreliable narrator to believe, and wonder, too, about the paradox of the Cretan liar, who told people not to believe him. It doesn't seem right to believe that Harry Trellman is Saul Bellow. But neither can it be right to see them as standing at a distance from one another; the physical descriptions can now and then be found to match, and we may be meant to notice this. Harry sees the often merely sour Adletsky as astute: does he think, as novelists are apt to do, that the rich are interesting? The book contains many references to their brand-named luxury goods and gains: one Chicagoan owns “several Goya portraits, as well as some Picassos of my favourite kind”, which is pitching it high, and may or may not be meant to seem like part of Harry's pitch. Do we take his word for it when he calls “commonplace” most of the people he is gossiping about—among them, the elsewhere prodigious Adletsky—or Amy's word for it when she tells her resumptive boyfriend, in a language we associate with more than one of the heroes or narrators of Bellow's previous books, that he has led a “high-level mental life”? These puzzles are intriguing. To make what we can of them it is worth turning to those of his previous novels where similar questions could be asked.

At the centre of many of them shines a solar ego. They transmit a strong personality, a strong will. In a discussion of Bellow's typical characters. Nicholas Spice has referred to them as “variant hypostases of a central Bellowian godhead”. Out of this godhead there can issue a confessional comedy of the paranoid response, in which a narcissistic hero, or consciousness, is affirmed and ironized—as here: Trellman is aware, in hindsight, that for most of his species he “generally had a knife within reach”. Not all of Bellow's fictions answer to this account, but some do. It rests on the notion of an authorial presence which invests his narrators and heroes, together with their symbiotes and dualistic opposites: on the bi-partite notion, in other words, of a strong self and of a mutability of the self. The novels and stories in question are dominated by the author and his avatars.

In order to speak generically of these arrangements, it might be appropriate to resort to the ancient categories and call him a lyrical writer, and a romantic one. The formal properties of the novels and stories in question, their dramatic structure, their endings and non-endings, are accommodated to the fact that their author has yet to end; it's as if each of them can only stop when the writer does. Somewhere in these intimations of deferment, and immortality, may lie a reason for the “looseness” benignly identified by Spice, and perhaps, too, for the writer's interest in the closures effected by funerals.

Those of Bellow's characters who aren't avatars, who are comparatively remote from the rays of this perpetual sun, are brilliantly evoked, and are the subjects of a proliferation of first-rate sub-stories or sub-plots: but it may be equally true to say that it is sometimes possible to mix them up and to forget—as can happen with characters in Dickens—which book they belong to. The books they belong to are works in which the writer may seem, for the most part, to be talking about himself and his enemies, and about first and further loves, in which he can, from time to time, be experienced as a divided consciousness, as a diversity to which enemies have access. This is not true of all of his fictions, nor are they always as soulful, as ethereal and eternal, as they are at times. And it is not true of the one which is the most expressly dualistic, and which could well be reckoned one of his best. The Victim unequivocally ends, is quite tightly plotted, and would encourage no one to find in the mutuality and division of the pair of characters at its centre any unmistakable lyric cry.

These arrangements add up, in other hands, to a way of writing poetry. But they are also, and have long been, a way of writing novels, one which Bellow's marvellous literary achievement has served to perpetuate, as the axis created in Anglo-American fiction by Martin Amis's admiration for his work would seem to show. No more Bellowian book, in the generic sense, than Money. Over here in England too, the godhead.