Woody Allen sings a duet with himself. He doesn't truly engage with others, doesn’t show genuine interest in them. He loves producing his own voice, loves hearing it — an idiosyncratic blend of awkwardness and eloquence, stammering and assertiveness, name-dropping and originality. Reality, it seems, barely touches him, so consumed is he with himself, nestled within the affluent confines of Manhattan. He rarely watches films — unless his wife drags him to a documentary on Leni Riefenstahl. Celebrated in Europe, reviled in the U.S., he forcefully deflects any criticism that would compel him to look in the mirror and confront a reflection he’d rather not create.
For instance: the widespread unease over a man marrying his partner’s adopted daughter, 35 years his junior. Or the chilling allegations from his own daughter, who, in a documentary, looks straight into the camera and recounts deeply disturbing behavior from him when she was just seven. One detail lingers: a toy electric train circling endlessly in the attic of the family’s lakeside home, while, she claims, her cunning father was abusing her.
That circular motion becomes a potent metaphor for Allen’s life and art. Hailed by many as an auteur with a distinctive aesthetic and narrative voice — and by many, especially Israelis, as a brilliant Jewish-American comic mind (despite never visiting Israel and seemingly uninterested in its struggles) — Allen’s lifestyle, persona, film career and public image form a closed loop. Even in his prose, he writes the same neurotic, restless protagonist we remember from both his early and later films: the self-loathing figure who turned Allen into a cultural icon, born in the 1930s and still creating into the 21st century.
This is a man who, to put it mildly, doesn’t trouble himself with making a living but is perpetually tormented by unattainable desires — be it love, recognition, meaning or the lack thereof. What once felt groundbreaking in the ’70s and ’80s — a pre-therapy-era portrayal of male fragility and neurotic self-sabotage — now lands differently. The pitiful, over-talking, balding, bespectacled man obsessed with women, seemingly lacking for nothing yet never content, now reads as cringe-worthy at best, problematic at worst — especially in his narrow representation of gender and milieu.
Later incarnations of this type — Rob Morrow’s Dr. Fleischman in Northern Exposure, Jason Alexander’s George Costanza in Seinfeld or Larry David in pretty much everything he’s created — are more successful. They’re aware of others. They acknowledge their flaws to those around them. Allen’s protagonists, by contrast, are engulfed by narcissism. They believe, like all narcissists, that no one could possibly understand them. And so they talk to themselves — pour their hearts out to themselves — because, really, who else is as charming, perceptive and morally decent as they are? Who else will listen with such openness and empathy? Does anyone even care that they’re forever pushing a boulder uphill? And if they ever got it to the top, what would they gain? A boulder on a hill — terrific. Is that the prize?
This could be the inner monologue of any Allen protagonist — from Isaac Davis, the 40-something screenwriter in Manhattan (1979) who finds emotional refuge in dating a 17-year-old high school student; to Hannah’s ex-husband in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), who fakes a religious conversion to dodge despair; to the writer Harry Block in Deconstructing Harry (1997), who mines the real-life suffering of the women around him for literary inspiration.
The same archetype returns in Allen’s debut novella, What's With Baum? — a short novel about a 51-year-old journalist with creative aspirations that never quite materialize, who begins, unsurprisingly, to talk to himself.
This isn’t a story of a mental breakdown or descent into madness, as the back-cover blurb might suggest. It’s not about hopeless despair, addiction or the unraveling of identity. Nor is it an emotional upheaval — because who really has the energy to feel anything deeply in the detached world of Manhattan elites, where people power-walk on treadmills because their doctor said to. Rather, it's that familiar affliction we've seen repeatedly in the works of well-fed Western white men: a mild neurosis that shakes the ground slightly beneath a self-absorbed bourgeois but never causes it to collapse.
Philip Roth created a similar protagonist in Portnoy’s Complaint, writing with far more fluidity. Assi Dayan gave us Mr. Baum, whose final hour is consumed by the realization of life’s futility. Allen aligns himself with Camus’ The Stranger — no less — but where are Camus’ inner tensions in the face of Allen’s compulsive need to craft punchlines?
The protagonist is clearly a stand-in for Allen. Not just because “Woody” and “Baum” both refer to trees, but because Baum stumbles into behavior that could easily be read as inappropriate — unwanted physical contact and a misplaced kiss toward an Asian-American journalist (“the Chinese girl, whatever her name was,” as he says) during a press interview. Naturally, the woman becomes a threat to his career.
Allen dedicated the book to his wife, Soon-Yi, and reading it is like listening to a grandfather repeating the same jokes (which are still funny, even the hundredth time), despite being told what "OK, Boomer" really means. Failed marriages involving an affair with his wife’s twin, falling for a young woman dating his stepson, suspicions that his current wife is cheating on him with his brother — every relationship is a superficial exercise in opportunism.
It’s hard to believe Allen wrote this novel recently. More likely, it came from a drawer full of drafts yet to be published. There’s no reason to assume he isn’t a graphomaniac, considering his reverence for philosophers, scholars and novelists — and because the protagonist is four decades younger than Allen and wrestling with problems that preoccupied the author over thirty years ago.
Baum is consumed with envy and bitterness toward his wife’s son, whom he sees as a smug little brat who grows up to be a successful literary celebrity, while Baum himself fails as both novelist and playwright. What he claims to want is for literature to get at the truth of “what the hell is going on here, for God’s sake? Who’s in control?” He wants his books to shift perspectives, to leave behind volumes that might ease others’ suffering. But in reality, writing is just a bid for external validation. “He was determined that his tombstone wouldn’t read, ‘Here lies Asher Baum. So what?’”
This isn’t Allen’s first foray into fiction. He’s published short stories — plot-light, but clever and witty — including one cringe-worthy tale about a man who is physically attracted to his wife but needs a prostitute for intellectual stimulation. He also released a memoir, arguably his best written work to date, especially in the unsentimental parts recounting his formative years: his indifference to literature, his fascination with baseball, Bob Hope and beautiful women.
Allen began his professional writing career while still in school, earning more than his parents by his teens. He effortlessly cranked out some fifty jokes a day for newspapers and ad agencies — thirty of them during the 40-minute train ride between Brooklyn and Manhattan. In recent weeks, he’s been enjoying something of a “greenwashing” — a puff-piece interview with Bill Maher (who barely let him speak) and reviews that conveniently ignore the ethical question of welcoming him back to the cultural arena through a novel so minor and outdated.
Allen remains a Jewish-American icon, but it’s doubtful he’ll be remembered in the same breath as Susan Sontag or the Coen brothers. When asked, “Why a book now?” he replied, “Because movies aren’t what they used to be.” It echoes Uri Zohar in his later years: “There are no good movies anymore.” Both are wrong. It’s they who aren’t what they used to be.
What's With Baum? by Woody Allen, translated by Katia Benovich, published by Yedioth Books, 190 pages.