DRIVE, BELLOW SAID

The star of Saul Bellow’s The Actual is a stretch limousine. This is unsurprising in a novella that anyone who cares for American fiction will want to read, but not for the reasons that ordinarily send you diving into a novel and stroking through it. The limousine ties the story together and is, in some ways, the best-realized character in the book. When Amy Wustrin joins an elderly billionaire and his wife inside, things start to roll. When she is all alone in a cemetery supervising a reburial operation at the novella’s close, the faithful limo comes to get her, bearing her fervent admirer in its back seat so the plot can resolve. When we first meet this automobile, it is ” very slowly coming up through the snow, lounging along the curve” — a “great polished concert-piano limousine.” Bellow likes this piano image so much he uses it twice, which is understandable; every word he writes about this car is perfect. The passengers ride in “a luxurious little parlor with the TV screens shining cokey gray, iridescent.” A great writer is one who can tell you what a TV set looks like when it is turned off.

The two main human characters are another story. Harry Trellman, the narrator and Amy’s fervent admirer, half-works; Amy doesn’t work at all. The characters slip in and out of focus. Weird gargoyles overdecorate the story and threaten to stave in the roof. But you read it anyhow and like it, for the incomparable dryness of the tone, and the fact that Bellow is one of five or six living authors who can dominate the English language the way Heifetz dominated the violin, de Kooning dominated oil paint, Roy Rogers dominated his horse. (Assuming he did dominate his horse.) And underneath the gargoyles, the story’s structure is simple and majestic.

Trellman is a middle-aged cipher who dated Amy long ago and then allowed her to be claimed by a series of other men — two husbands and various lovers. He built over the years a successful import business, bringing battered Oriental antiques to Guatemala City and fixing them up on the cheap. Then he returned to Chicago, where Amy’s second husband divorced and humiliated her and then died. The husband was a lawyer and sex-besotted cheat, but she had become an adulteress herself, so he bugged her in the act and played the tape all over Chicago. Trellman watches brisk and lonely Amy, loves her still, thinks about her constantly, and does nothing. His position is plausible and moving; he is the Sphinx in love — unblinking, all-seeing, incapable (to his resigned sadness) of stirring. When Amy needs to oversee the exhumation and reburial of her late louse of a husband, for reasons that are too complex and nonsensical to be worth spelling out, the limo’d billionaire steps in and makes the story finish.

Amy’s character never comes clear. The details we get are too sparse and haphazard to allow us to see a whole person. When Trellman dated her in high school, she put on her lipstick imperfectly. “She didn’t walk like a student. There was also the faulty management of her pumps.” The many years since ” have had no power to change her looks, the size of her eyes, or the brevity of her teeth.” I can believe that these and other such facts pressed on us by Trellman from his drawerful of assorted mementos might describe an actual woman, but I have no idea what she would look or be like. That Trellman is obsessed and in love with her is merely an assertion, neither plausible nor implausible. “Of course,” says Trellman, “she was no longer the beauty she had been.” What kind had she been? Her dialogue is unconvincing. “A slug of disgrace is what it took to make a battler out of me.” “You did behave like a wild bitch.” Who talks like that?

Her husband Jay Wustrin is equally out of focus, as fuzzy as his last name – – which is exactly the wrong type of name for a novel. Until you settle on a way to read it, the two leading possibilities rattle around like loose bolts in the undercarriage, driving you crazy and ruining the sound of many a fine sentence. No doubt Bellow did this on purpose, one more droll grotesquerie.

A Bellow narrative, this one more than any other I know, is a bed of fallen leaves blasted dry into weird, complex curls and flutings and hollow, weightless shells. The urge to crunch such leaves underfoot is (for many people) irresistible, like eating potato chips, so the story draws you onward. We learn about Trellman first, and then the billionaire, then Amy, and then the limo rolls onto the scene and a day’s action unfolds, winding up at the cemetery and the coming-to-terms of Amy and Trellman. The author knows exactly what he is doing and tells us about it like a tour guide along the way. Over on the left is “a freakish mix-up” leading to the reburial. Coming up on the right is a Mrs. Heisinger and her “intricate ideas.” Ordinarily you accept the strange details with a shrug, but sometimes they are mere aimless doodles. Amy’s first husband rushes briefly onstage and we learn that he ” inherited a small raincoat factory.” Naturally. Such items are too easily concocted.

So what’s good about this novel? The breathtakingly true and beautiful passages you encounter on every other page. Humiliated Amy sees on someone’s face an expression with which she had become “all too familiar” — “a sidelong, oblique look of amusement, appearing on the half-averted cheek.” Amy’s second husband was Trellman’s friend and plied him with sex tales: ” With Oriental patience,” says Trellman, “I held still while he loaded me like a beast of burden with his anecdotes.” Trellman listened willingly; he is a masochistic-type Sphinx. “I remembered his anecdotes when he had long forgotten them.” This last sentence is a knockout punch, and stands alone as a paragraph in itself. The book has a rhythm that reminds you of Mozart’s last piano concerto, which opens with lovely halting dignity — three irregular phrases put together with two single-bar pauses. (“I myself was both larger and heavier than my parents, though internally more fragile, perhaps.”)

The story’s structure is simple and spacious. This reviewer’s encounter with its key passage surpassed his previous greatest Bellow-reading experience. (When The Dean’s December was published in 1982, I was a graduate student, ostensibly of computer science but actually studying the technical details of writing and painting at the minutest, picayunist level I could reach. I thought of Bellow as a great stylist and was fascinated by what I took to be his heartlessness. When I reached a point where his characters suddenly turned real — where an abstract, distracted lady astronomer curls up in her narrow childhood bed, her hair spread out on the pillow behind her, and is comforted by her husband — I was astonished. I hadn’t grasped that Bellow was capable of that kind of writing.) The Actual centers on the old billionaire’s telling Trellman, “Our friend Mrs. Wustrin is going to have a bad day of it at the cemetery. No woman should have to do such a chore alone.”

This statement sends the plot chugging home. It is powerful in two ways — on the universal scale and in the specific world of the book. First, it has Biblical resonance. On the point of creating Eve, God says, “It is not good for man to be alone.” (“No, nor woman neither,” Bellow wants to add, with Hamlet.) Second, the statement rings true as a record of one Jew talking to another about a third, in a vanishing world whose sounds we still recognize. The Greek narrative hinges on a moment of catharsis, pity, and terror, the Jewish narrative on rachmones, pity and kindness — a homelier, less histrionic emotion that used to exist as a last resort, not always but often, between Jew and Jew; a weary old car that kept running many years after its allotted lifespan, and kept getting you where you needed to go. Bellow is scared to death of kitsch, and he successfully avoids it. The old billionaire’s declaration is the emotional hinge of the story.

The ending, on the other hand, doesn’t come off. It makes sense, but the dialogue is too lackadaisical to support it. The layout and design of the book are unforgivable. Viking evidently believes that Saul Bellow is such a great author, his novels ought to look like The Bedtime Book of Precious Little Pronouncements you can find near the maroon candles at your local gift shop.

Still, The Actual is an object worth the indignity of owning. Trellman refers to Jay Wustrin, Amy’s dead husband, as “the late Jay” — “Behind this was a freakish mixup, just the sort of joke that appealed to the late Jay.” This is worth the price of admission, and in its own small way shows Bellow’s greatness. There are many ways the thought could have been put; the most obvious version is plain “Jay” without “the late” — we already know he is dead. But “the late Jay” is a brilliant phrase because it is so short and tight, so wry and dry and funny. Who knows how a great author invents such phrases? It is hard to say even, in the end, why they are so good. E. B. White’s advice to young writers was to get lucky, and if that is indeed what it takes, Bellow is one of the luckiest men of our time.

Contributing editor David Gelernter, our art critic, wrote last week about Robert Hughes’s American Visions.