SOURCE: Wood, James. “Essences Rising.” New Republic 216, no. 24 (16 June 1997): 41-5.

In the following favorable review, Wood calls The Actual a slight book, but maintains that it possesses “its own nervous perfection.”

This novella is a ricochet from a talent that has already hit many targets: it has an interrupted energy. The Actual is slight, without the obvious weight of Bellow's major work. Yet it has its own nervous perfection. Like all his work, it is about our wrestle for the essential amid the piles of our emotional slack. Like several of his stories, it has at its buried center a portrait of a sharp, canny, limited old man, accustomed to power—the type of old commander whose abrasions and self-satisfactions enrage and delight Bellow. The Actual tells us that love is what matters; in this, too, the novella hangs from the branches of Bellow's more complicated work, offering...