THE ACTUAL.<i> By Saul Bellow</i> .<i> Viking: 104 pp., $17.95</i>

Novelists don’t age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late 20s. 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, 9-to-5ers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavor. They become 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 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 unfailingly 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 had turned 70. But this wasn’t Late Bellow. Late Bellow, or Even Later Bellow, was just about to crystallize.

In a 1991 essay, Bellow quoted Chekhov: “Odd, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read--my own or other people’s works--it all seems to me not short enough.” And he added: “I find myself emphatically agreeing with this.” Like “Him With His Foot,” Later Bellow consists of three novellas (“A Theft,” “The Bellarosa Connection,” “The Actual”) and two short stories (“Something to Remember Me By” and “By the St. Lawrence”), the whole running to about 350 pages. Shortness, certainly, is to some extent enforced. And when one casts about for comparable examples of literary longevity (Singer? Welty? Pritchett?), one seems to be moving naturally and inevitably toward a realm of sparer utterance.

Of course, the picture may change all over again. Pretty well the only useful sentence in Harriet Wasserman’s thoroughly superfluous memoir* reports the existence of two uncompleted novels, which may still emerge. And even that disclosure feels impertinent. When I reflect that the Wasserman volume (my proof copy has had the final section physically sheared out of it, doing little for its general deportment) is a mere look-see compared to James Atlas’ massive anatomy--the Life, due next year--I find that my protective instincts are strongly stirred. Among many other things, “The Actual” reminds us that the fiction is the actual, the truthful record. As its narrator, Harry Trellman, observes:

“Your inwardness should be--deserves to be--a secret about which nobody needs to get excited. Like the old gag . . . Q: ‘What’s the difference between ignorance and indifference?’ A: ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’ ”

Although Bellow has spoken of “the more or less pleasant lucidity” attainable “at this end of the line,” it is not the kind of lucidity that deals in apothegms, admonitions, “answers” (“Nobody expects to complete their feelings anymore. They have to give up on closure. It’s just not available”). “It All Adds Up” was Bellow’s cheerful title for his collection of discursive prose, but the imaginative life allows for no confident aggregations. The author of “Dangling Man” (1944!) was far more inclined to assert and propound than the author of “The Actual.” And whereas, for example, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” presented the Holocaust as a graspable historical event, “The Bellarosa Connection” steadfastly and honorably refuses it all understanding. The story “By the St. Lawrence” contains a deeply apposite figure:

“Intensive-care nurses had told him that the electronic screens monitoring his heart had run out of graphs, squiggles and symbols at last and, foundering, flashed out nothing but question marks.”

Later Bellow is a distillation but not a distillation of wisdom. Capability has gone negative, confining itself to what can decently be said.

These meditations are concerned with human attachments, most obviously or publicly the consanguinity peculiar to the Jews. Confronted by the obsessive torments of a mittel-European refugee, the narrator of “Bellarosa” silently advises: “Forget it. Go American.” The advice is of course frivolous, a symptom of the “American puerility” he detects in himself, but it’s a popular option. Ravaged and haunted, the surviving elders look on helplessly as their children submit to American lunkification, homogenized by a carnal culture. The Jews have a special centrality, reconferred on them by the 20th century, but now they are shedding their quiddity, their ties of remembrance and their talent for the transcendental. Toward the end of “Bellarosa,” the narrator encounters just such a Jew-gone-native, who mocks him for his old-style sentiments. The last page beautifully registers the weight of what is being lost:

“Suppose I were to talk to him about the roots of memory in feeling--about the themes that collect and hold the memory; if I were to tell him what retention of the past really means. Things like: ‘If sleep is forgetting, forgetting is also sleep, and sleep is to consciousness what death is to life. So that the Jews ask even God to remember, ‘Yiskor Elohim.’

“God doesn’t forget, but your prayer requests him particularly to remember your dead.”

Loved ones can absent themselves without dying and Later Bellow is adorned with many variations of amorous regret, grief, nostalgia and thought-experiment. Seen from both points of view, by the way: Let me drown out certain fashionable murmurs by trumpeting the assurance that no one writes more inwardly about women than Bellow. Look at Sorella, look at Mrs. Adletsky; look at Clara Velde, from “A Theft,” fully incarnated in a single sentence (students of literary economy should examine its comma): “The mouth was very good but stretched extremely wide when she grinned, when she wept.” While you love, that which is innate in you becomes malleable; so love shapes you. In “Something to Remember Me By” and “By the St. Lawrence,” this shaping goes all the way back--to moments of youthful awakening, qualified by a complementary accession to death. The con-girl seductress, the child in the coffin, the wait outside the bordello, the body on the rail track: Bellow makes us feel the mortal hold of these raw configurations.

A complex tale, ranging emotional urgencies against material powers in present-day Chicago, “The Actual” is even more scrupulously written than its immediate predecessors. We notice the “dried urban gumbo of dark Lake Street”; we glimpse a silhouette “in the gray bosom of the limo TV”; an ancient billionaire is “like a satin-wrapped pupa.” But after 80 years of passionate cohabitation, the author’s relationship with language has evolved into something like sibling harmony. The desire for vatic speech is undimmed, yet no riffs, no party pieces, accompany it. Bellow’s prose remains a source of constant pleasure because of its manifest immunity to all false consciousness. It plays very straight. “There is great variety in my dreams,” one Bellow hero confides: “I have anxious dreams, amusing dreams, desire dreams, symbolic dreams. There are, however, dreams that are all business and go straight to the point.” Later Bellow is something like that: all business.

As I was putting this piece to bed, the launch issue of a literary magazine arrived on my desk: the Republic of Letters, edited by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford. Its lead piece is a new Bellow story, entitled “View From Intensive Care” and tagged “from a work in progress.” Picking up on certain details in “By the St. Lawrence,” it describes a medical close call--with heroic, terrifying and near-comical detachment (“Taking note is part of my job-description. Existence is--or was--the job”). Well, existence still is the job. And while the new story increases the scope of Later Bellow, nothing qualitative has changed. There is a great deal going on in these short fictions, tangled plots (for tangled lives) and intense formal artistry. But what accounts for their extraordinary affective power?

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page--stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author. Or, in this case, with something even more fundamentally his. Bellow’s first name is a typo: that a should be an o.

* “Handsome Is: Adventures With Saul Bellow” by Harriet Wasserman (Fromm: 160 pp. $23.95)