"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. Will he investigate the culture wars, which in his case flared up recently with a visit to the Moscow film festival?"
Asher Baum is a bespectacled, anxious, hypochondriac Jewish novelist with two ex-wives, a Connecticut home and a Manhattan pied-à-terre. He meets an attractive young journalist in Bemelmans Bar and later places his hands on her shoulders and gives an inappropriate kiss, triggering outrage and professional peril. The tone is nostalgic, comic, and steeped in familiar mannerisms, with many effective gags and vivid New York set pieces. The narrative moves fluently and plausibly on its own terms but eventually collapses into perfunctory, unresolved farcical silliness. The story does not directly confront the protagonist's wider public controversies or culture-war tensions.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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