Would Woody Allen’s first novel be better as a film?

Read “What’s with Baum?” without knowing who wrote it and you might think it’s a “straightforwardly unremarkable” novel charting the “midlife crises of a neurotic, vaguely lecherous writer”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. “But, of course, we do know the author of ‘Baum’. And that author is 89-year-old filmmaker Woody Allen.”

Allen’s novel – his first – comes five years after the release of his memoir, “Apropos of Nothing”, and arrives at a time when his film career appears to have “tailed off” following allegations (which he vehemently denies) that he sexually abused his daughter in the early 1990s.

‘Dancing around taboos’

“What’s with Baum?” is “almost exactly what you’d expect from Woody Allen the novelist”, said Darragh McManus in the Irish Independent. The action follows Asher Baum, a neurotic Jewish journalist (and “frustrated” author) who loves beautiful women, good conversation and jazz. His marriage to his third wife, Connie, is “hitting the rocks”; he hates living out in the countryside in their Connecticut mansion and can’t stand Connie’s son Thane, an “insufferably handsome and smug youngster on the fast track to literary stardom”.

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In what is presumably an oblique reference to Allen’s own “cancellation” following allegations of sexual abuse, there’s a “brewing #MeToo-style scandal” as Baum is accused of “acting inappropriately” with a female journalist.

Allen spends much of the novel “dancing around taboos” as he details Baum’s “infatuation” with younger women and Connie’s oddly close relationship with her son, said Chilton in The Independent. Female characters are repeatedly referred to as “creatures”, and Baum’s wife is described as a “complex thoroughbred”. It’s all rather “wince-inducing, even if it weren’t coming from Allen’s pen”. The book is stuffed with cultural references that “add little to the story”, instead reaffirming the filmmaker as a “man out of time”. And these issues aren’t helped by the “inelegant” prose that veers into “abjectly clunky” territory at times.

‘Impish’ prose

I thought Allen’s familiar new book was “fine”, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. It afforded me “a few hollow chuckles” after a particularly gruelling week. “Even kneecapped by the entertainment industry, he rises to knock out an impish piece of autumn prose as others might a game of pickleball.”

I wish he’d addressed the cancel culture subplot more directly, said Tanya Gold in The Telegraph. But there’s some “lovely comedy” peppered throughout the book and Baum has “all the hallmarks” of an archetypal Allen protagonist from a film “I would love to watch”.

While a very clever filmmaker might be able to “get round the plot’s implausibility, the thinness of the characters and occasional discordant political correctness with good acting and cinematic technique”, in a novel these things are important, said Melanie McDonagh in London’s The Standard. “‘What’s with Baum?’ might work better as a film.”