China and the West

Begley, Louis. Old flames and trillionaries. [Review of] Bellow, Saul. The actual. [ID D32604].
Harry Trellman, the novella's narrator and protagonist, is in his 60's, a product of one of those lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhoods of Chicago that are Bellow's heartland, and a very odd duck indeed. His father was a carpenter, his mother an oddly elegant hypochondriac whose sojourns in American and European spas were financed by her brothers, who were rich sausage manufacturers. Although both parents were perfectly alive at the time, they put Harry in an orphanage -- for convenience. This circumstance, together with his appearance -- a face sufficiently Asiatic to let him pass in China for a native -- has reinforced his sense of having ''a masked character'' and made him a nihilist.
After the Korean War and Chinese language school, Harry went to China and then, for two years, to Burma. There, he tells us, ''I made important business connections. . . . Provided with a lifetime income through the Burmese operation, which had a Guatemalan branch, I returned to Chicago where my emotional roots were.''