A FEW SCATTERED IMPRESSIONS ON WOODY ALLEN’S NOVEL WHAT’S WITH BAUM

 What’s With Baum, 

I just started it and so far have only read a few pages. I’ll read on but it strikes me as more of Woody Allen’s shtick.  It—so far—comes across to me as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth derivative and light. It seems to me intellectually mediocre kvetching with superficial allusions to works of art and to philosophy that are designed to suggest erudition and intellectuality but come across as meant to impress us with how widely Woody Allen himself has engaged art and thought. Also, the quips, jokes, often in the service of self deprecation, seem flat. I wasn’t moved—it’s only a few pages mind you—by anything he’s written. In one way of seeing it as a first impression, it’s a 90 year old man trying to portray a 50 year old man, but who comes across as 90. 

———-

I’m now about 1/5th through Woody Allen’s What’s With Baum. I’ve just finished the scene between Baum and his brother. It’s beyond silly. Baum wants to disinter their 20-years-dead father for having failed to bury him, per his wish, dressed in his Masons’ uniform. His brother, Josh, refusing, makes clear the absurdity of it. Baum, tipsy, also makes an obscurely veiled reference to his belief that Josh slept with his, Baum’s, wife. Baum isn’t a character. He’s a caricature. He doesn’t come alive. Rather, he’s constructed, a construct, the result of Allen’s all too evident laboriousness. It’s more shtick than literature.

———

Now 4/5ths through Woody Allen’s What’s With Baum. I’m in the midst of him spending an afternoon with his stepson’s girlfriend so like an ex-wife, his one true love. Check out the art name checking, the banal conversation meant as insight, the dull jokes and the flabby writing:

“They worked Soho and the Meatpacking District. Some of the art was wonderful and some was not so wonderful. Baum loved art and thought of all the young artists struggling to emerge in a world that loved art, was moved by art, needed art, and paradoxically gave artists such a hard time. He thought of Thane and a feeling of anger came over him which he filed for later consideration not to spoil his afternoon. They lucked out at a photography exhibit and saw some fabulous Lee Friedlanders and then a few Weegees.”

———-

“‘Yes, life teases, doesn’t it?’ Sam said. ‘So much charm and beauty, so much Dachau.’ ‘If you’re lucky you wind up with a rock on a hill. What good is a rock on a hill? It’s nothing. It’s nothing. I’m sorry I didn’t mean to rant so loud.’ ‘What if it’s not a rock but a great book?’ ‘You’re very perceptive but ask me that question in a few billion years when to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there’s no here here.’” 

———-

I’ve finished What’s With Baum. No spoilers. Just to say the ending is as flat as the whole novel. I’d give it, in the way of these measures, 2 of 5. Easily readable but irritatingly pretentious. What Allen ultimately goes for, he doesn’t reach. Baum’s dissolution is thin gruel.