A curious sort of volume, this; readable from end to end in not much more than half an hour, a novella [The Actual] which is probably a half or a third as long as some of Chekhov's short stories, it nevertheless contains levels of feeling and implication which seem to belong to a much longer and more spacious book. Its leisurely manner, its casual way with its characters and themes suggest a novel with plenty of time to waste, and the brevity of the book comes as an abrupt surprise. It is, perhaps, slightly reminiscent of another short book, written late in its author's career, about the super-rich, Graham Greene's Doctor Fischer of Geneva; but where that was a neat, black fable, this is a real novel in miniature, with loose ends and richly detailed characters. It is exactly like Bellow's long novels, with their unclassical proportions and appealing lumpiness, but all in 20,000 words. It would be hard to know what to add to The Actual, and, after having read it twice, harder to know what to take away.

Naturally, it's all, as Baldrick would say, a cunning plan; to build up your characters and your plot through careful irrelevancies and casual memories, to let a trivial conversation drift on with every appearance of aimlessness are ways in which the ingenious novelist can convincingly reconstruct the world around him. The labyrinthine manner of The Actual conforms to the real world, we are persuaded, because it conforms so little to the demanding structures of art; and when, on reaching the end, we look back and find it has formed a perfectly satisfying and symmetrical whole, we are surprised, since, in reading it, it has seemed only to be the casually shaped anecdote of a professional hanger-on.

Harry Trellman, an importer of Chinese artefacts, comes unpredictably to the notice of Sigmund Adletsky. To Adletsky, Trellman is ‘a first-class noticer’; a man who not only knows and recalls which college obscure athletes went to, the date individual banks were established, but someone who notices and remembers the curious hidden dynamics in social groups. A useful sort of man. To Trellman, Sigmund Adletsky is more or less what he is to the rest of the world, an ancient trillionaire, ‘a name instantly recognised everywhere’. He and his wife, Dame Siggy—‘something like a satin-wrapped pupa'—are fabulously exotic, through wealth and their extreme old age; she ‘would judge a woman's behaviour by standards from the days of Franz Josef and still more or less observed by nonagenarians’.

Adletsky is in the process of buying an apartment from a monstrous pair, the Heisingers; he is a manufacturer of hideously vulgar toys, she—just about forgiven—has recently served a prison term for trying to have her husband killed. The negotiations, which are long and protracted due to the Heisingers' insistence that the Adletsky buy their furniture at an inflated rate, are attended by the Adletskys' interior designer, on whom the Heisingers hope to place pressure.

Amy Wustrin, the interior designer, has her own history in all this; her second husband, Jay, a not very successful lawyer, divorced her in shameful circumstances. Briefly, he fancied himself as a ‘swinger', persuaded her to have sex with other men—including the narrator, Harry Trellman—and then divorced her on the grounds of her adultery. Trellman's feelings for Amy, however, are rather more substantial than anyone quite suspects, or than he can admit to without embarrassment: ‘Love object would be the commonest convenient term to indicate what Amy became to me. She has been the only love of his life, and now, in encroaching old age, he is almost reconciled to nothing. He has always been someone whose motto is ‘I'm not going to let them lay all kinds of feelings on me’; now, there is only one feeling, if that, left to him.

This intricate pattern, made up of three couples—the Adletskys, the Heisingers, and Amy and Harry—sets off an extremely strange action, made up of two bizarre set-piece episodes. In the first, Madge Heisinger spills hot tea over Amy in the course of the endless negotiations, and traps her in the bathroom with an extraordinary business proposition. In the second, Amy's awful dead husband, Jay, is exhumed from the cemetery plot where he is buried next to his mother-in-law and reburied in solitude, while Amy and Harry watch, bringing their long-suspended relationship to some sort of resolution.

The odd thing is that this resolution is only brought about with the intervention of other people. Amy and Harry are united by the planning of Adletsky, whose immense wealth and benevolent interest in the two of them gives him the fairy-godmother role. But his conscious benevolence is neatly balanced by the idiocy of the dead Wustrin, who only bought the plot where he is buried for his father-in-law, and was buried there himself by mistake, simply because his children found the deed to it. And yet Wustrin plays the key part in bringing them together, and his motives, which throughout are absurd in their transparency, become quite irrelevant. What he wanted to achieve, what he achieved; two different things. As Trellman observes at the beginning, ‘It's easy enough to see what people think they're doing.’

So what? the reader may say. An ordinary story, set among people made extraordinary only by money. As Harry says of the others:

They were run-of-the-mill products of our mass democracy, with no distinctive contribution to make to the history of the species, satisfied to pile up money or seduce women, to copulate, thrive in the sack as the degenerate children of Eros, male but not manly, and living, the men and women alike, on thread-bare ideas, without beauty, without virtue, without the slightest independence of spirit.

But for once the disgust is misplaced. I think the embittered paragraph about the run-of-the-mill products strikes a slightly wrong note, making us think that the generosity we find everywhere else in the book is not Harry talking, but Bellow. It's true that most of the people in the story are fairly difficult to like; even Harry, who is so chilly he refuses, as a child, to let himself enjoy The Count of Monte Cristo, or Jay, who has parties for all the women he has ever seduced. But, oddly, the generosity of the style, the unstoppable interest in the history of all the characters make up for their unpleasantness. We are not always convinced that Harry would be capable of writing this relaxed, amused book, of serious, ancient charm, but, by now, it shouldn't surprise us to find that Bellow is.