What’s With Baum? by Woody Allen evaluation – the film-maker’s late-life first novel | Books

What’s With Baum?, by 89-year-old debut novelist Woody Allen, is about … a bespectacled Jewish novelist. Asher Baum, anxious and hypochondriac, with two ex-wives, a good-looking house in Connecticut and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, finds himself having cocktails in Bemelmans Bar with a horny younger lady. Whatever shocks you may count on from this novel, the shock of the brand new isn’t one of them.

Reading What’s With Baum? is an eerie, nearly unearthly expertise, like being taken to some secret Narnia a part of New York the place a brand new Neil Simon play is about to open, or a document retailer the place you may take a look at a Burt Bacharach LP within the listening sales space, or a TV studio the place you may watch a reside taping of the Dick Cavett Show, with Robert Wagner, Rex Reed and Gore Vidal. Allen’s mannerisms, his themes, his comedy – and there are some superb gags right here – are simply the identical as they ever had been. In truth, this novel is extra fluent, extra believable by itself phrases, than any of his current films – although it lastly collapses into perfunctory and unresolved farcical silliness in a really acquainted means.

So: will Allen use the extra confessional inside prospects of the novel to deal with a few of the controversy about him personally, such because the 1992 allegation of sexual assault made by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow? Will he examine the tradition wars, which in his case flared up just lately with a go to to the Moscow movie competition? The reply isn’t any, though it appears at first as if he may do all these items – as if, in actual fact, they’re the entire level of his story.

Asher Baum has just lately given an interview selling his newest ebook to a younger Japanese-American journalist referred to as Cindy Tanaka (or as Baum distractedly says: “Cindy Mindy Woo – the Chinese one whatever her name was”), on whose shoulders he afterwards positioned his arms and to whom he gave a deeply misjudged and inappropriate kiss. Now Baum’s agent is on the cellphone warning him that the interviewer is outraged, that the piece goes to be a #MeToo takedown, and that Baum’s profession – moribund in any case – is now completed.

The reader could also be on tenterhooks to learn how Baum’s shruggingly ironic, nervily sardonic worldview goes to carry up in the course of this imminent political storm – and, by that token, what it’s prefer to be Woody Allen. But the storm by no means arrives. Cindy Tanaka by no means seems in her personal individual within the story, which successfully finishes earlier than the article comes out.

The level is somewhat to point out Baum’s basic comedian unravelling, and the surfacing of all his neuroses. Like Herzog’s compulsive letter writing in Saul Bellow’s novel of the identical identify, Baum begins overtly speaking to himself, a jabbering dialogue of self-confrontation and self-exculpation. Subjects embody his extra profitable businessman brother (whom he suspects of getting had a fling along with his third spouse) and an mental mentor who, to Baum’s consternation, intends to desert the lifetime of the thoughts to play tambourine in a New Orleans jazz band referred to as the White Chocolate Dandies.

But most significantly there may be Baum’s spouse, Connie, and her unbearable son – and Baum’s stepson – Thane. Here is the place the novel involves life. As a child, when Connie and Baum had been first courting, Thane was an appalling brat. Now, whereas Baum’s profession flounders, with nasty opinions and tanking gross sales, Thane instantly turns into a literary famous person with a smash-hit novel referred to as The Bevelled Heart. It’s a title that annoys the hell out of Baum, eaten up as he’s with envious rage, having apparently change into Salieri to this appalling younger Mozart.

There are loads of good strains alongside the best way. Baum despises animals for being “failed humans”. He says the sexual sign “goes round and round endlessly, like radar” and that guilt is that “powerful enveloping element as prevalent as oxygen and perhaps just as necessary”. Poor Baum simply has to maintain working, like Sisyphus: “Does anyone give a damn that I’m pushing a rock up a hill? And if I ever get it up there, then what the hell have I got? A rock on a hill.” Baum, and his creator, are nonetheless pushing.

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