DATE: Sunday, May 25, 1997                  TAG: 9705210704

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER 

                                            LENGTH:   76 lines

NOVELLA IS JUST A TASTE OF WHAT BELLOW CAN OFFER

THE ACTUAL

SAUL BELLOW

Viking. 104 pp. $17.95.

On the face of it, Saul Bellow's new novella, The Actual, has all the trademark Bellow features - the stormy Chicago weather, the oddball Jewish characters, the cranky well-read protagonist.

But they're all a little sallow. Lacking are the depth, the richness, the trenchant observations and wide-ranging intellectual asides that have made Bellow's novels such complete delights - and earned him three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Here we get Bellow through a straw - good, tasty, but far less satisfying than his previous big gulps.

The main character in The Actual is Harry Trellman, a retired importer who even in middle age seems half-formed. He never published his one intellectual endeavor, a book on Walter Lippmann. He's Jewish, but can pass for Chinese. He's back in Chicago with ``unfinished emotional business.''

His best-developed skill is an ability to read people and events. Harry is a ``first-class noticer'' in an age when ``there aren't too many observant people,'' says Sigmund ``Siggy'' Adletsky, a trillionaire businessman. So Siggy hires him to be his personal ``brain trust,'' an immediate repository of fast takes on people and situations.

And that hooks up Harry with a crazy clique of Chicago characters - most prominent among them the wealthy toymaker Bodo Heisinger and his wife, Madge, who was jailed for plotting to kill Bodo, but has been taken back by him.

``This Madge Heisinger was a real turn-on,'' Harry reflects. ``Imagine what an effect she would have made lying nude, wearing nothing but the sapphires, drawing a man toward her with salty sweet-talk. Plus (let's not omit it) the extra relish of a plotted murder. Bodo the intended murderee was tremendously proud of her. And of himself, an aged manufacturer and worldwide distributor of muscular, horrendous, laser-armed space aliens for small boys and girls.''

Harry, the Heisingers, Siggy and his wife all come together when the Adletskys consider buying some of the Heisingers' belongings. Then in walks Amy Wustrin, the antique appraiser, who becomes the novella's key figure. She was Harry's high-school love, and the flame hasn't died.

Bellow offers some of his most tender writing - and one of his most sympathetic female portraits - as he illustrates the affection Harry still feels for Amy:

``Half a century of feeling is invested in her, of fantasy, speculation, and absorption, of imaginary conversation. After forty years of concentrated imagining, I feel able to picture her at any moment of any given day. When she opens her purse to find her house keys, I am aware of the Doublemint chewing gum fragrance that comes out. When she is in the shower, I can tell you how she raises her profile to the spray.''

She, Harry comes to discover, is ``the actual,'' the thing that really counts - not his role as observation-gatherer, not the curious set of people he's surrounded by. ``I myself seem to be doing an idiotic thing,'' he realizes, ``in looking for signs of highest ability in human types evidently devoted to being barren.''

The prose is sometimes winning, the dialogue snappy. ``He's got a condom over his heart,'' Adletsky says of one of his banker associates.

But Harry bolts to the inevitable conclusion much like one of those herky-jerky el trains that lumber above Bellow's beloved Chicago. And he's not the most inspiring of narrators - blank, generally passive, hardly the great thinker/seer he's cracked up to be.

Talking to Amy, he philosophizes, ``Well, we all understand what our condition is. It's an age of liberation. It's like a great ship, and the passengers are always trampling toward the port side, or stampeding to starboard, and about to capsize.'' That's no match to Bellow protagonists Sammler and Herzog.

Now in his early 80s, Bellow has turned in recent years to novellas. Compared to ambitious, long-running novels such as The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog or Humboldt's Gift, The Actual feels a bit flimsy, cramped. Still, it's better than no Bellow at all. MEMO: Philip Walzer is a staff writer.

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