The Actual (1997) appeared in hardback , unlike The Bellarosa Connection and A Theft which made publishing history when they appeared in paperback. It is the familiar Bellow story of an old adolescent love which is finally admitted to and resumed. The worldly and clever Harry Trellman, a grand noticer of things, and ambassador of the arts is invited to "notice"on behalf of another grand old noticer, Sigmund Adletsky. Adeltsky welcomes Harry's intellectual gossip because though he is rich beyond imagining, Adletsky is now like Napoleon on St Helena, somewhat socially exiled and bored. Harry will be his intellectual informer and brains trust, while Adletsky for his part will discern the nature of Harry's great unrequited adolescent love, Amy Wustrin, and finally bring the two together. Here is one of the most familiar of Bellow's themes, the true human failure to recognize what is Amy Wustrin, Harry's long lost and unrequited adolescent love. She is Harry's "actual," a woman in whom he has invested half a century of love, longing for, and imaginary interaction. A love story about two elderly people, The Actual is told with all the familiar descriptive realism of other Bellow works. It is about that perennial Bellow theme of the embodied nature of the soul and the strangeness of love in memory and in future anticipation. David Gates (Newsweek V. 129 (April 28, 1997: 74-76) observes that Harry Trellman, actually notices a whole lot less than Sigmund Adletsky, the man he is supposedly "noticing" Along with several other reviewers he complains that this book, with its upbeat ending proves to be "thin gruel, with featureless characters and tin-ear dialogue." He surmises that were it not for Bellow's stature, he might not have gotten away with this piece. Justin Cartwright writing in the London Financial Times (August 16, 1997 Books Section, p 5) likewise notes that there are only a few flashes of vintage Bellow here. Bellow "has lost his sure touch" and now seems repetitive and pointless, with the characters being only poor repetitions of earlier richer versions. Worse, many passages seem like "bad pastiches of abstracts from other books, particularly Humboldt's Gift" and only a brief description or two of Chicago has the old Bellow power. He concludes that "age does take its toll, even on a genius like Saul Bellow." 

Alfred Kazin, a lifelong Bellow admirer, thinks otherwise, noting that in this book Bellow appears to be as sharp as ever. These Chicago Jews, he notes, are much better off than those of the Augie March years, but display just as much soul, and all the old Chicago angst about being in the know. Kazin believes that Bellow has now reached the prophet stage, typical of old American Jewish radicals who "sigh over the mediocrity of our national arrangements." He notes some brilliant visual effects, the usual lack of story, as well as the fact that Amy is merely "a wistful attempt to redress the usual [gender] imbalances." Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times (April 25, 1997 Section C, page 28, column 3) notes its much finer scale and finds in it much of aesthetic value, locating Bellow with the great existential writers like Dostoevsky and Sartre, Dreiser and Melville. However, Kakutani sees The Actual more as a work of sensibility, a "Bellovian variation on James, a variation that oddly stands as a mature distillation of Mr. Bellow's work to date: a twinkling if semiprecious gem that recapitulates in miniature the issues and ideas that have animated his fiction of the last 50 years." Kakutani also sees the ending of this novel as reminiscent of that of Humboldt's Gift, and "an apt and touching finale to Harry's story" whose elegiac tone reminds the reader that this is a late work whose language though distinctly Bellovian, is considerably more subdued. The lengthiest and most serious response seems to be that of James Wood of the New Republic (V. 216 June 16, 1997 : 41-45) who comments that though lacking the uninterrupted energy of the major works, it has its own "nervous perfection" as it hits the familiar old theme of wrestling for the essential "amid piles of our emotional slack." Though the book has "rationed power" it has plenty of sentences on which Bellow has breathed." He admires many of the passages of physical description, particularly that of aged people, women's bodies, and the Chicago landscape. Woods also recalls the stern fathers in Bellow's earlier works and suggests a mellowing in this late work in the father-son relationship between Harry and Sigmund Adletsky, where for once "communication was not arrested." He concludes that all Bellow's novels have been occupied with that most 19th century and Russian of questions about what in life was essential and that in this work Bellow finally tells us, "we are here to seek what we are here for. That is our actual." 

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