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 handsome home in Connecticut and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, finds himself having cocktails in Bemelmans Bar with an attractive young woman. Whatever shocks you might expect from this novel, the shock of the new isn’t one of them.
Reading What’s With Baum? is an eerie, almost unearthly experience, like being taken to some secret Narnia part of New York where a new Neil Simon play is about to open, or a record store where you can check out a Burt Bacharach LP in the listening booth, or a TV studio where you can watch a live 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 very good gags here – are just the same as they ever were. In fact, this novel is more fluent, more plausible on its own terms, than any of his recent movies – though it finally collapses into perfunctory and unresolved farcical silliness in a very familiar way.
