It’s not terrible. It’s fine. … Afforded this reader a few hollow chuckles ... Some missing commas and odd misspellings ... Reading What’s With Baum? is not unlike going for a pleasant stroll in Washington Square Park and then stepping in doggy doo ... Oy! But this is Woody Allen: Even kneecapped by the entertainment industry, he rises to knock out an impish piece of autumn prose as others might a game of pickleball.
Whatever shocks you might expect from this novel, the shock of the new isn’t one of them ... An eerie, almost unearthly experience ... 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 ... There are plenty of nice lines along the way ... Baum, and his creator, are still pushing.
There’s no real need for What’s With Baum? to exist as a book, though it is reasonably well-written, diverting enough for a few hours ... Sloppy and repetitive; the plot tips over into silliness quite often and none of its strands are resolved wholly satisfactorily ... The weakest part… is the anachronistic feeling throughout ... It’s hard to know what to make of What’s With Baum? ... Woody Allen is an inimitable genius who can do whatever he likes. On the other hand, again, it doesn’t feel particularly necessary or vital… or much of anything, really.
Allen is a comedian at heart – and it works if you want to live inside Woody Allen’s head. His minor characters are stereotypes, but his own is filled out, another fretful journey to the parts of himself he can reach ... Allen fans will enjoy it, and I did; Allen haters will not; the disinterested will be baffled.
The prose is flaccid ... The novel’s driving force – Baum’s fussy, anxious dialogue with himself about his many problems, physical and mental – is a monotone of narcissistic kvetching ... Guaranteed to ensure only the tedium levels of readers will be aroused to the max.
There are many things that the world needs in 2025, but I’m not sure that the debut novel by 89-year-old Woody Allen is one of them ... It all sounds perfectly chucklesome, but the story — what there is of it — seems fuelled by a deep undercurrent of nastiness ... Is the writing any good? Well, no ... All the best sentences have been crammed into the first page and all the drama happens in the last 20 ... Most of it is kvetching and ogling ... An absolute failure of noticing ... Place Allen in any room, he’ll see less than anyone else.
