Just as we have had an American E. M. Forster who, as first interpreted by Lionel Trilling, was more timeless and universal, less grounded in his social origins than the British version, there now seems to be a British Saul Bellow who bears small resemblance to the American original. While critics at home have concentrated on Bellow's material—the offbeat Jewish characters, the Roman candle of deep thoughts, the often bitter jeremiads against modern culture—his British admirers, led by the reverential Martin Amis, have drawn attention to the sheer spin of his inventive sentences. By extracting Bellow from his own polemics and from the ethnic ghetto of Jewish-American writing, they offer a challenging if partial view of work that American readers had long taken for granted. Bellow's Collected Stories, with a charming anecdotal preface by his wife, Janis Bellow, and an incisive introduction by James Wood, gives subtle support to the United Kingdom version of his career. Though Bellow is not well known for his short fiction, these stories, selected to highlight his later work, feel more disciplined, more written than his longer books. While Mrs Bellow's preface gives us a glimpse of the author at home, Wood closely scrutinizes “the happy rolling freedom of his daring, uninsured sentences”. (That “uninsured” is a neat Bellovian touch.) With a keen eye for Bellow's arresting metaphors, which he compares to metaphysical wit, Wood singles out prodigious descriptive details (“his baldness was total, like a purge”). He also makes the unsustainable claim that Bellow is, “with Faulkner, the greatest modern American writer of prose”. Had this title any substance, it could as soon be awarded to half a dozen other writers, beginning with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But this is the British Bellow in a nutshell.

In the concentrated vividness of the writing and the breadth of its speculative reach, this is an extraordinary collection. But like all canonizing editions, it is revealing for its exclusions and its arrangement. The book arrives exactly sixty years after Bellow's first stories began appearing in Partisan Review, but there is no trace of those early writings here. The earliest stories are from 1951 (“Looking for Mr Green”) and 1957 (“Leaving the Yellow House”); they give little hint of Bellow's later manner. The first is a slightly allegorical, open-ended tale of Depression-era Chicago, written in the faintly Kafkaesque manner of Bellow's second novel, The Victim; the second is a brilliant, utterly depressing portrait of a fading woman, an alcoholic survivor down on her luck, that reads like a Western variation on his great failure-story, Seize the Day, published the previous year. Although that tightly scripted novella has always been a critical favourite, between the breakthrough of The Adventures of Augie March in 1953 and Humboldt's Gift in 1975, Bellow was seen as a loose-limbed, garrulous writer in the tradition of Whitman and Mark Twain. But in parts of Herzog set in the Montreal of his childhood, in his signature story “The Old System” in 1967, and with three long stories of the early 1980s from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories, 1984, Bellow's work took a turn from the social to the soulful, the radically introspective. Filtering stories through intellectual protagonists who were versions of himself, he began unlocking old memories of family and friends, memories that grew more pressing as he grew older.

In Bellow's late fiction, narrative gives way to character sketches, numinous descriptive detail, and reflection on ultimate questions (“why life, why death … why these particular forms?”). Even more than novels like Herzog and Mr Sammler's Planet, which largely unfold in the minds of their central characters, Bellow's stories are almost devoid of present action. They are built instead around a man musing, reflecting, sorting out a mental galaxy of people in his life and their meaning for him. Some of his best subjects are colourful intellectuals like Isaac Rosenfeld or Harold Rosenberg, “Thinker Princes” whose deaths he mourned. Others came from the extended family that shaped his emotional being as he was growing up. Reminiscent of Fellini and late Bergman, this circus of memories took over Bellow's work, leading to his inspired portrait of his Chicago friend and colleague Allan Bloom in Ravelstein (2000). Bellow's short fiction became central to this retrospective project.

The sequence of the stories bolsters this late emphasis on memory. Instead of arranging them in chronological order, Bellow begins and ends the volume with his two latest stories, both framed by an old man remembering. In the previously uncollected “By the St Lawrence” (1995), his protagonist returns to his Canadian birthplace, as Bellow did, after a near-fatal illness, and even wonders whether he might not live out his days there. He visits a dying cousin, the last of his generation, who doesn't share his overweening interest in the past. In “Something to Remember Me By” (1990), a man revisits a day in 1933 when his mother lay near death, while he himself, at seventeen, was caught up in a humiliating sexual adventure. As “a high-minded Jewish schoolboy … with his eye on a special destiny”, he thinks: “I had this coming.” Bellow plays up the contrast between family—a mother whose death he cannot face, a brutal father, older brothers puzzled by his bookishness—and the street, with its pitfalls and freedoms. “At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.”

Thinking back, the writer sees this as a calling; his work would straddle the life of feeling, forged inside the family, and the life of cities just beyond. He now understands that on his boyish errands he was taking “a reading of this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city”. Ageing writers often try to pinpoint the sources of their inspiration. But these reflective stories feel like a testament, an exorcism, yet also a way of using early experiences to fathom mysteries of death and life, the enigma of attachments. This was the programme Bellow had set for himself in family stories like “The Old System”, “The Silver Dish” and “Cousins”, three of the strongest pieces in this book, works that combine Proustian recollection with bold experiments in style. With their tremendous interest in archaic forms of Jewish family life, these stories belong to the ethnic Bellow, the metaphysical Jewish comedian long celebrated in America. But their pared-down writing, dotted with sharp sentence fragments, rolling cadences and physical details rich with spiritual intimations, highlights the prose master celebrated by Amis and Wood.

Finally Bellow's project transcends these differences, for his style cannot be separated from the world he is writing about. Braun, a biochemist, thinks back on his family in “The Old System”; he recalls them as “a quarrelsome congregation. Every question was disputed. There was rivalry, there were rages; slaps were given, families stopped speaking. Pariahs, thought Braun, with the dignity of princes among themselves.” This is Bellow the pointillist, building up his canvas with tiny strokes of recollection, deploying as his surrogate an inquisitive scientist who sees matters almost on the molecular level. The analytical distance is particularly impressive in rendering character. Of one proud, obese, difficult woman, he writes:

Tina willed consistently to appeal for nothing, to have no charm. Absolutely none. She never tried to please. Her aim must have been majesty. Based on what? She had no great thoughts. She built on her own nature. On a primordial idea, hugely blown up.

This is unlike any other writer, unlike Bellow's earlier work; it is at once spare and poetic, general but precise, eerily detached yet suffused with insight. Bellow's method, as always, is to anchor the inner being in its physical appearance, the form we choose to have.

Some sub-office of the personality, behind a little door of the brain where the restless spirit never left its work, had ordered this tremendous female form, all of it, to become manifest, with dark hair on the forearms, conspicuous nostrils in the white face, and black eyes staring.

Scanning these characters to fathom who they essentially are, the Bellow observer erases the line between the descriptive and the metaphysical, between his memories of a handful of proud, obstreperous Jews and the riddle of human nature itself. This foreshadows the turn towards ultimate questions at the story's end.

When Bellow's stories move from meditations on family to sketches of his intellectual heroes, the impact is immense. Zetland, based on his youthful soulmate Isaac Rosenfeld, comes from a family where people “read Russian novels, Yiddish poetry, and were mad about culture”. He is attracted to science, to philosophy, to metaphysics, wondering “what were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest?” But a reading of Moby-Dick turns him from abstraction towards literature: “It rushed over him. He thought he would drown. But he didn't drown; he floated.” Other Bellow characters have the same experience of being uplifted by art, wafted into the sublime. Still others, like Victor Wulpy in “What Kind of Day Did You Have?”, the longest story here, have always dwelt in a rarefied world of ideas. Based on the art critic Harold Rosenberg, an outsized personality by any standard, Wulpy is mythicized into a sovereign strategist of mind, a commander of comprehension.

Bellow rivals Thomas Mann in his gift for portraying intellectuals without demeaning or burlesquing them. His admiration here is laced with high comedy. Bellow stumbles only when he models the genius figure too obviously on himself, as he does in “A Theft” (1989), the only unconvincing tale in this collection, or in the self-regarding late novels like The Dean's December and More Die of Heartbreak. Victor Wulpy, on the other hand, is the type of universal mind that humbles Bellow, as it awes those around him, especially his much put-upon mistress, Katrina, through whose eyes we mainly see him. One of Bellow's best woman characters, Katrina is a suburban housewife with cultural aspirations who is slavishly devoted to this lofty creature. But Victor, as an aristocrat of the mental life, is beyond merely personal concerns. He is unfazed when his plane seems about to go down. He pays “no more attention to death than to a litter of puppies pulling at the cuffs of his pants”. He discusses his troubled daughter with the same radiant detachment he brings to any other subject: “Victor was not the type to be interested in personality troubles. Insofar as they were nothing but personal, he cared for nobody's troubles. That included his own.” Yet these stories are spectacles of personality played out against a backdrop of ideas, a pastiche of serious thinking. In the end, we see Victor's limitations as he himself comes up against the limits of life itself, “limits he had never until lately reckoned with”. Ailing, failing, “now he touched limits on every side”.

Finally, Bellow's stories about intellectuals form a unique body of work. Whether he uses them to reflect on their dead, to excavate family feeling, to stage their own excesses, or to lament the passing of a way of life, they give his late fiction an exceptional heft and intensity. Like his quarrelsome old Jews, they are pariahs with the dignity of princes. They remind us that whatever we do, in the political world as well as the contemplative life: “it has to be a powerful reading of the truth of existence. Metaphysical passion. You get as much truth as you have the courage to approach.”