As the obituaries for Saul Bellow rolled in last week – a quiet counterpoint to the organ-blasts of mourning for the pope – you could hear the creaks of a life stiffening into history. Death changes the way we look at a great writer; most often it marks the beginning of a long period of eclipse; the literary world luxuriates in the spaciousness of his absence. “There was always something a bit oppressive about his magnitude,” Thomas Mallon admitted on Slate.com; Clive James wrote that Bellow sometimes “makes me think that he has used up the world, with nothing left over for the rest of us.” For the most part, however, death shrinks a writer in more subtle ways. Obituaries and reminscences, with their dutiful attempts to sum up Bellow’s achievement for the indifferent reader, already suggest how this process will affect him.

If journalism is the first draft of history, most of the Bellow obituaries read like the first draft of a high school English textbook, neatly slotting Bellow into the official Pageant of American Literature. In the process, he is reduced to a geographic or sociological category – the chronicler of Chicago, the Jewish-American writer – and his work becomes an uplifting example of the melting pot in action, an injection of immigrant boisterousness into the torpid American sublime.

Thus the first sentence of the New York Times obituary declared that Bellow “gave new immediacy to the American novel in the second half of the 20th century,” while the Boston Globe noted that he was responsible for “the emergence of a new protagonist in American literature: modern, Jewish, as alienated from his surroundings as Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in ‘The Metamorphosis.'” (Surely Bellow would have been immensely amused by the crude monetization of his achievement in the Reuters obituary – “Saul Bellow, who rose from writing book reviews for $10 apiece to become one of America’s greatest novelists after World War II.” – as he was his generation’s sharpest satirist of America’s philistine tendency to equate income with merit.)

If Bellow is flattened in future textbooks the way he has been in obituaries, it will be a shame, but not a surprise – just look at the way pedagogy reduces Hawthorne, our strangest psychological novelist, to a dreary Puritan, or Whitman, that bizarre sexual mystic, to a tame panegyrist of national greatness. That a similar fate is in store for Bellow is suggested by the one quotation that almost every obituarist agreed upon, the opening of “The Adventures of Augie March”: “I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” This demotic American individualism was, indeed, part of Bellow’s spirit, but it was not the most important or essential part. The too-dutiful, too-American flourish of that famous sentence, its naked insistence on being compared with Melville and Twain, makes it a brassy distraction from Bellow’s real complexities.

Bellow’s death should be the occasion for a more searching examination of his work, since nothing more clearly shows the essence of a writer than the accommodation he makes with death. To a certain kind of writer, death comes as a terrifying affront – like Philip Larkin, who could not stop dwelling on “the anesthetic from which none come round.” To others, it comes like a long-awaited bride, trailing a gloomy magnificence – Wallace Stevens insisted that “death is the mother of beauty.” For writers of Saul Bellow’s generation, the problem of death assumed new and monstrous proportions. Born during World War I, veterans or observers of World War II, shaped by the Atomic Age and the Holocaust, they had to make sense of death not just as a personal ending, but as a universal doom. Some responded by making a fashion of alienation and absurdity; others, like Bellow’s near-contemporaries Camus and Milosz, by confronting death like resistance fighters, heroically refusing to surrender their human dignity.

Despite his comedy, Bellow was not an absurdist; despite his humanism, he was not an existentialist. Those postures, which can be necessary and noble ones, already imply a greater accommodation with death than Bellow ever made. Indeed, even now, after Bellow’s far from unexpected death at the age of 89, it remains peculiarly hard to hold the idea of Bellow and the idea of death in the mind at the same time. For his fiction is the greatest vindication of D.H. Lawrence’s description of the novel as “the one bright book of life.”

All of Bellow’s novels, from “Dangling Man” to “Ravelstein,” are almost painfully alive, in a way that makes even the best fiction of his contemporaries seem wan. More than that, they offer themselves as evidence of life – not simply of Bellow’s own life, which they intimately record, but of a life principle that does not need to do battle with death, because it is greater than death. This is the intuition that comes to Albert Corde in the last pages of “The Dean’s December,” as he looks up at the sky from the Mount Palomar observatory:

And what he saw with his eyes was not even the real heavens. No, only white marks, bright vibrations, clouds of sky roe, tokens of the real thing, only as much as could be taken in through the distortions of the atmosphere. Through these distortions you saw objects, forms, partial realities. The rest was to be felt. … Rocks, trees, animals, men and women, these also drew you to penetrate further, under the distortions (comparable to the atmospheric ones, shadows within shadows), to find their real being with your own. This was the sense in which you were drawn.

This passage beautifully illustrates the connection between Bellow’s electric, mystic intuition of life and his famous “noticing,” his ability to capture details that most of us can’t even see. Surfaces, for Bellow, may be “distortions,” but they are distortions that reveal “realities”: They are the trailing hem from which Moses inferred the passing of God. Every reader will have his favorite examples of this noticing, small moments saved from oblivion by Bellow’s prose. Take the scene in which Bellow’s own Moses, Herzog, bustles through Grand Central Station, in flight from his marriage and himself. Nothing could be more banal than this daily commuter’s trudge; yet Bellow makes us see the station’s “lights like drops of fat in yellow broth,” which rhyme in turn with Herzog’s newspaper, “a hostile broth of black print.”

This gift is most extraordinary, and most significant, when it comes to Bellow’s descriptions of people. He gave us the old men in the Russian Baths in Chicago, who “stand on thick pillar legs afflicted with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles”; the derelict poet Humboldt, “gray stout sick dusty,” with “death all over him”; a hydrocephalic child, in whom “the family face was compressed, reduced, condensed into a cat’s face.” By capturing the singularity of their ugliness, Bellow allows even these gross or wounded figures to shine out as what, to him, they really are: not just bodies but souls. And it is his belief in the soul, not as a dogma or a humane illusion, but as an indisputable presence, that will make Bellow endure, long after the particular milieu of his fiction has vanished like Balzac’s Paris or Dickens’s London. No writer gives a more moving testimony to the suspicion of life that overcomes the certainty of death, as he declared in the last line of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”: “For that is the truth of it – that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”