Bellow's work speaks loudly

As James Wood notes in his introduction, "It is hard to find in (Bellow's fiction) any of the usual conventions of realism or even of storytelling." His characters are "embodied souls, stretched essences". Corporeality and consciousness form the main flow of his narrative, banked by incident: death runs through everything, implicit and uncomprehended.

At 86, Bellow's deconstruction of death as a commentary on consciousness seems a more dramatic position than ever. In an Afterword, he betrays some anxiety that in this great game between death and the human mind, this lifelong contest for significance, he might be robbed of victory, not through a failure of art or intelligence but because the terms of the contest itself are unstable.

Perhaps artists always feel, at the end of their lives, cheated, by the vigour of trivia and modernity, by the unstoppable refulgence of the new. When the artist himself is new, this vigour flatters him: when he is old, it seems as if the world has turned its attention elsewhere. Bellow appears strangely chastened by the importance of pop stars and celebrities ("I don't want to be understood as saying that writers should be concerned about the existence of these other publics"), the "gas clouds of opinion" generated by the modern media, the addled, overstuffed globalised world in which literature seems to him unavoidably dwarfed; and history itself, which produces "states of mind and attitudes toward existence that artists must take into account".

Take into account, yes; account for, no. Bellow's concern that the imprint of his mind - his writing - will be washed away by time is an expression of perfectionism. A writer's work must be situated: it cannot remain, in every particular, modern.

And Bellow was so utterly modern that, like Joyce, his inventions remain, even now, unsurpassed in American literature, a literature that bears all the marks of his influence. Indeed, the core of Bellow's genius resides in this issue of situation, the deep imputations of tragedy he draws from the human body, its untransposable, imprisoning materiality.

In an essay on Bellow, critic Cynthia Ozeck wrote that in spite of the difficulty of discerning Bellow's motivation as a novelist, one would instantly recognise a paragraph of his prose if it were to be washed ashore in a bottle. This distinction, between motivation and recognition, describes perfectly the work itself.

"Aunt Rose, Braun felt, was the original dura mater," writes Bellow in The Old System, "the primal hard mother. She was not a big woman. She had a large bust, wide hips, and old-fashioned thighs of those corrupted shapes that now belong to history... Her face was red, her black hair powerful. She had a straight sharp nose. To cut through mercy like a cotton thread. In the light of her eyes Braun recognised the joy she took in her hardness - hardness of reckoning, hardness of tactics, hardness of dealing and of speech."

These stories, which span Bellow's writing life, are a testament to the remarkable, defiant, glorying force of his mind, to his sheer ability, his exactitude (a description of a florist: "Amid the flowers, he alone had no colour - something like the price he paid for being human"), his comedy and rigour. You will rarely find a lazy, subjective sentence in Bellow's writing: his prose is outgoing, full of risk and excitement; it is a performance, which approaches and attains beauty with a combination of musicality and skill.

In her preface, Janis Bellow attempts - and does not, it must be said, succeed - to give a picture of her husband at work: she reveals that his oeuvre has a considerable shadow, of uncompleted novels and abandoned ideas. From this prolific nature, always restraining and moderating itself, trying, as Bellow puts it, to "trouble no one with his own vanities", has emerged a literature of more distinction than could be given it by modernity. The world may be watching television, but that does not alter the fact that Bellow is our greatest living novelist.