What’s with Baum?
By Woody Allen
Post Hill Press, 192 pages, $28
If you’ve seen a lot of Woody Allen’s movies, you’ll feel you’re on very familiar territory if you opt to read his newly published first novel, What’s with Baum? One example: in Hannah and Her Sisters, the Michael Caine character falls in love with his wife’s sister, and Allen ends up married to his ex-wife’s sister; here, we learn that Asher Baum, our protagonist, a not terribly successful middle-aged novelist, married his first wife, Nina, only to become smitten two months later with her sister.
Baum lives with his rich third wife in rural Connecticut, even though, like the characters played by Allen in any number of his pictures, he’s a Manhattan creature, through and through, who is enamored of the big city’s “[b]ookstores, record shops, cinemas” and who has “always hated the country, everything about it: the ticks and spiders; the racoons [sic], cute but with rabies; the poison ivy; the sound of crickets and cicadas.”
When Baum anxiously ponders the terrifyingly incomprehensible scale of “the grudging universe,” one is reminded of the scene in Annie Hall when a very young Alvy Singer complains that life is futile because the universe is expanding. Baum’s medical scare, which turns out to be nothing, is right out of Crimes and Misdemeanors. And when he reflects that New York “still held him in its charismatic grip” and that “he always pictured it scored by Rogers [sic] and Hart,” you recall at once the opening of Manhattan — although in that movie, of course, New York “pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.”
There’s more. Baum’s love of Bora Bora and Venice reads as a nod to Everyone Says I Love You; the first time he met his second wife, Tyler, in the middle of a New York summer, she said to him, “I think we must be the only two people left in the city” — a line right out of that same movie. And when Baum and Samantha, his stepson’s fiancee, visit the Met and contemplate a painting by Pissarro, and he explains “how he would love to step into that painting and be there, then, not here, now,” adding that “the people you see in the Renoir painting probably longed to live in the Fragonards” — well, that’s the whole premise of Midnight in Paris.
What’s with Baum? takes place over a period of just a few days, but there’s a lot of flashbacks to his disappointing personal history (the love of his life, Tyler, left him for a rock star who quit showbiz to raise sheep in New Zealand) and his equally disappointing writing career (he wants to be Dostoevsky or Kafka, but is told by critics that his work is “didactic” — a word that features significantly, by the way, in Broadway Danny Rose). What makes Baum’s present situation particularly difficult is that his current wife, Connie, who once thought him brilliant and promising, has given up on him entiriely and transferred her adoration to Thane, her twenty-four-year-old son by a previous marriage, who’s male-model handsome (he looks, we’re told, like a young Alain Delon) and has published a bestselling novel, The Beveled Heart, that the critics love.
Baum shares the tastes, preoccupations, and anhedonia of many of the protagonists of Woody Allen’s movies.
Connie worships her son. Baum hates him, envies him, obsesses over him. In fact, that hate, and what he sees as Connie’s “creepy” attachment to the boy, is this novel’s leitmotif. One cannot help but be reminded of Allen’s longtime mistress, Mia Farrow, whose devotion to her son Ronan Farrow (who is supposedly Allen’s biological son, although she has hinted that his real father was Frank Sinatra) was, at least during his boyhood and adolescence, reportedly off the charts. Then there’s the fact that Baum, on top of all his other woes, has been accused of sexually molesting a female reporter — which can’t be read as anything other than a reference to the bogus charges of child molestation that a vengeful Mia leveled against Allen all those decades ago.
But What’s with Baum? is more than just a grab-bag of allusions to Allen’s movies and life. It’s a great read, perhaps not as much of a laugh riot as one might have hoped, but nonetheless a highly engaging ride. One thing that’s distinctive here is that Baum, who shares the tastes, preoccupations and anhedonia of many of the protagonists of Woody Allen’s movies, talks to himself all the time: What’s with Baum consists largely of dialogue between Baum and Baum about his marital woes, professional frustrations, and existential anxieties. It’s impossible not to sympathize with this latest version of the neurotic, nebbishy protagonists whom we’ve come to know, care about, and laugh along with ever since Take the Money and Run came out a full 56 years ago last month.
What else is there to say about What’s With Baum? Well, most of the way through, it’s essentially a plotless, Ulysses-like ramble. Also, it’s awash in Yiddishisms. Baum kvetches about the meaninglessness of life, has tsuris-ridden interactions with Connie and Thane, schmoozes with an old school friend, has shpilkes over a meeting with a publisher. Oh, and he spends a perfect day in Manhattan with the above-mentioned Samantha, a zaftig shiksa whom he’s hoping he can steal away from his vantz of a stepson. After a certain point, one assumes that this book is going to add up to nothing more than a congenially meandering account of a particularly challenging chapter of one schlemiel’s life — and one accepts that as being far more than enough. But then there’s a wonderfully unexpected twist, and it’s truly delicious, and one finds oneself thinking that this could be a Woody Allen movie. And not just a middling Woody Allen movie — one of the really good ones. Am I going to give away the twist? Of course not. Read the book.
READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: