SOURCE: Kazin, Alfred. “Struggles of a Prophet.” New York Review of Books (26 June 1997): 17-18.

In the following positive review, Kazin delineates the central thematic concerns in The Actual.

Saul Bellow will be eighty-two this summer. Not long ago, he told Playboy, he had been near death after partaking in the Caribbean of a fish that turned out to be toxic. But here he is [in The Actual], sharp as ever when he writes about low doings in Chicago and then adds his now customary outrage at the piggishness and mediocrity of American democracy.

Forty-four years ago Bellow's breezy young character Augie March noted, “I quit thinking long ago that all old people came to rest from the things they were out for in their younger years.” Augie was right. In the Bellow world the protagonist is never at rest, and never seems much older than Bellow was in...