Don't call him mellow Bellow

The Actual by Saul Bellow
Viking £12.99, pp112

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties. And novelists don't age as slowly as poets, some of whom (Yeats for instance) just keep on singing, and louder sing for every tatter in their mortal dress. Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. They come good at 30, they peak at 50 (the 'canon' is very predominantly the work of men and women in early middle age); at 70, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs. How many have managed to pace themselves through and beyond an eighth decade? Saul Bellow's The Actual has a phrase for this kind of speculation: 'cemetery arithmetic'. The new book also confirms the fact that Bellow, at 82, has bucked temporal law.

And bucked it twice over, it may be. Fifteen years ago, I believed that Late Bellow, as a phase, had begun with The Dean's December. The visionary explosiveness of Bellow's manly noon (Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift) seemed to have hunkered down into a more pinched and wintry artistry; the air was thinner but also clearer, colder, sharper. Then came the unfailing mordant and accurate Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. And then came More Die of Heartbreak, which now looks like yet another transitional work: a final visitation from the epic volubility of the past. The author has turned 70. But this wasn't Late Bellow. Late Bellow, or Even Later Bellow, was just about to crystallise.

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