If an average reader was handed the uncredited manuscript of Woody Allen’s first novel, how long would it take that person to identify the author? Well, by page eight, like the title character’s angsty suitor in Annie Hall, Asher Baum, a blocked middle-aged novelist, is already declaring a passion for the Evil Queen in Disney’s Snow White.
Apparently unconcerned about replaying the old tunes, Allen, 40 pages later, embarks upon an apparent rewrite of the famous opening monologue from Manhattan. “He lived in a Manhattan where men came home from work and changed into tuxedos,” he writes. Lest we fail to make the connection with the 1979 film – which begins to the strains of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue – the author, in the same paragraph, has his hero listening to “Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin”.
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It is impossible not to think of What’s With Baum? as a sketch for the movie Allen, whose staggeringly prolific cinematic run came to a halt with the likable Coup de Chance in 2023, is now no longer able to finance. The book is, literally and figuratively, thin stuff. Allen’s flat prose, dotted with cliches, serves merely as a mechanism to take us from one lengthy dialogue sequence to the next. Visual descriptions are sparse. Characterisation is shallow.
Yet one longs to see the film it might have become. Mia Farrow, the author’s now bitterly estranged partner, would once have slipped easily into the role of Baum’s disappointed wife. If shot today, Timothée Chalamet, star of Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York, would be perfect for her smug, talentless son. Baum’s jealousy at his stepchild’s undeserved success with a shallow novel is just the sort of unstable fuel that has powered the best (and bitterest) of Allen’s later films.
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What to make of the subplot involving accusations against Baum of sexual assault? It is there. It gives one character a chance to rage against the supposed unfairness of the post-#MeToo rearrangements. “In today’s culture an accusal is as good as a conviction,” Baum’s agent sympathises.
That story then retreats embarrassedly into the murky clutter of the novel’s penumbra. Readers seeking meaningful engagement with the allegations Dylan Farrow, the author’s adopted daughter, made against Allen – which he has denied – will leave this compromised, though diverting, work in a state of queasy disappointment.
