The Actual

In this first major work in 10 years from Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, Harry Trellman, the narrator, is an elderly Chicagoan who becomes the uneasy friend of Sigmund Adletsky, an even older millionaire. Adletsky shows Trellman how he must pick up his life with Amy Wustrin, a high school sweetheart he has never forgotten. As the story reaches its intensely poignant climax, we find Trellman in a cemetery in the middle of a Chicago snowstorm, helping Amy to re-bury her ex-husband, and finding a little self-redemption in the bargain. THE ACTUAL (1997), at 112 pages, is actually a novella. And, as in so many of Bellow's later novels, it includes an intense awareness of the approach of death.