Woody Allen Debuts as a Novelist: ‘What’s With Baum’

As with every creative endeavor Woody Allen has ever undertaken — an exhaustive list that puts him among the most fecund artists in American history — there’s a wistfulness to What’s With Baum?

Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper.

The filmmaker’s first novel hit the shelves a scant two months before his 90th birthday in November and it makes sense that he’s pining for days gone by. But it’s not simply the usual longing for a Manhattan of Cole Porter and wise-cracking dames and gentlemen in top hats and smart aleck sports writers who knew all the angles.

What’s With Baum? is a super lively and fun read, albeit with a plot and several characters who will be familiar to fans of Allen films. But here the wistfulness is not just for a bygone New York, but an entire era where people gave a shit about novels and novelists.

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What’s With Baum?
By Woody Allen
Post Hill Press; 192 pages

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The main character, Asher Baum, is impossible to read as anything other than the usual stand-in for Allen himself, not different enough from Alvy Singer, Isaac in Manhattan, Mickey in Hannah and her Sisters or Clifford in Crimes and Misdemeanors for it to make a meaningful difference. And that’s OK. He’s so richly drawn and complete, even in a book that took its aging author only five hours to narrate on the Audible version. He reads beautifully — Allen is an underrated narrator, as good on this audiobook and his memoir as he was doing the voiceover for Manhattan and Radio Days.

Baum’s marriage to Connie has lost its fizz. That’s partly because of his limited success as a writer of serious — critics call them “turgid” — literary works, but partly also because of her excessive, borderline inappropriate crush on Thane, Connie’s son from a previous marriage. Thane is the very handsome, very charming apple of his mother‘s eye, and his first novel is greeted with the lavish critical praise and blockbuster sales that have always eluded Baum.

Thane’s girlfriend Sam arrives on the scene and reminds Baum so strongly of his one true love, his second wife, Tyler, that Baum’s struggles with his mental health start to compound. There are twists and turns, hilarious one-liners, a still-electric pen. This is an excellent novel.

But I found it impossible to read without reflecting on some of the chaotic real-life drama that has consumed not just Woody Allen, but our culture. In much the way his eponymous character in Deconstructing Harry struggles to sort fiction from the chaos of his real life, for me it was impossible to read about Thane without picturing an amalgam of Ronan Farrow and Fletcher Previn. Especially Ronan.

John Cheever said, “Fiction is not crypto-autobiography,” and then proceeded to pen unforgettable portraits of alcoholism and suburban rot.

In What’s With Baum? Connie loves the woods, writes Baum a fan letter, speaks to her son harshly one time only (when he spills his Shirley Temple on Baum after seeing his mother‘s interest in him), hates the city and visits only so she can spend time with Baum as she seduces him, bringing her son along inappropriately on late-night dates and even on romantic getaways. All of these are code for the Mia-Ronan/Fletcher-Woody relationship.

In Baum, Allen writes:

Sometimes he would drive to her country house where she cooked for him. Those dinners included her son, and every once in a while, on a Manhattan date, a Broadway show, the Met, maybe a special meal at Le Cirque, she would ask if he minded if she brought Thane. She said she wanted to introduce him to culture, art, music, plays. He minded a little but not so much that it was a deal breaker. Like with the actor she once dated, who took her to Paris and she brought Thane along, she took him to Venice when Baum brought her there for a week. It had become clear to him that it was a package deal and if you wanted Connie, you bought Connie and Thane. He didn’t love it, he didn’t hate it, but he loved her and if that was the price for her quirk, he felt she was worth it. If only Thane wasn’t such a snotty little know-it-all.

In Apropos of Nothing, Allen writes:

It was clearly bizarre. I’d pull up in the car to pick [Mia Farrow] up for a date. She’d come strolling out of her apartment house, get into the Lincoln, and instantly grab the car phone to call Fletcher, whom she’d just left. OK, the kid has trouble separating. No one has more empathy with separation anxiety than me. But as weeks pass, she begins bringing him along now and then on our dates. The kid is laid down to sleep under the table at Elaine’s while all the adults eat, drink, talk till midnight. I say, But won’t he be too tired like this to function in school tomorrow? But if for any reason he might not want to go to school, she didn’t send him. He was the uniquely favored child, and he called the shots. A moment of conflict arose when I suggested she and I take a week and go to Paris. Only if we can bring Fletcher, was the reply. Otherwise, I’d rather not go.

In fictional Baum, there’s a pond at Connie’s country home. “It used to have frogs. They ate the mosquitos. Then I stocked the pond with bass so Thane could fish and the bass ate the frogs so the mosquitos came back.”

In real-life Apropos, “Cement baby that I was, I screwed things up at Frog Hollow because when Mia bought the place, her good-sized pond was brimming with frogs who ate mosquitos and kept the place mosquito free. I, thinking I was doing her a favor, stocked the pond with bass. Who knew the bass would eat the frogs, and there was no one left to eat the mosquitos?”

The comparisons are unmistakable. But an intriguing difference in the novel is that Baum is a failed writer of intellectual ambitions while Thane has a first novel that’s a massive sensation. He’s achieving success in exactly the way Baum cannot.

In real life, Ronan‘s modest achievements, including dubious breaches of journalistic ethics and outright advocacy in a way that will not stand the test of time, are wildly overshadowed by Woody Allen’s massive achievements as a director, writer, actor, playwright, short story writer, and now novelist.

One senses that Woody Allen could never be jealous of Ronan Farrow’s professional achievements. What he could envy instead, though, is Mia’s obsessive attention lavished on her fair-haired son. And even more his youth and good looks, which are undeniable.

(I remember having lunch at Michaels with Drew Grant one day. She was then married to Ari Melber, Ronan‘s colleague at MSNBC. Ronan was eating his lunch one table over and Drew and I said hello to him. He was so handsome it almost vibrated off him as a physical energy, exactly the same way it had with his mother when she sat next to my first wife and me at Eric Bogosian‘s one-man show “Pounding Nails into the Sidewalk with my Forehead.”)

Indeed, Baum seethes aloud about Thane, “he’s a good-looking kid, and now very successful but underneath he’s a mama’s boy. They’ll find out.” The hostility radiates off the page, and it’s awesome.

Elsewhere, the language and thinking are sharp as ever. Baum’s brother Josh lives in Battery Park. “Much glass all around. Glass, the building material of modern man. If ancient man had glass, the pyramids would have been see-through and you could feast your eyes on mummies in their beautifully painted sarcophagi if that was your thing.”

In addition to the precious mama’s boy, other themes will surely be familiar.

Baum falls in love with the sister of his first wife, Nina, which will surely resonate with those who remember Elliott‘s unforgettable “I’m walking on air” after he first kisses Lee, the sister of Hannah. The idea that success and good looks are such a powerful aphrodisiac that they will obscure the pretentiousness of even the most obvious blowhards also makes a reappearance as Baum fantasizes that his first love Tyler would have eviscerated his stepson‘s book. But then wonders if she would indeed have done so. It’s reminiscent of the unforgettable scene in Crimes and Misdemeanors when Halley (played perfectly by Mia Farrow) shows up at the wedding with Lester, whose constant wooing has worn down her defenses. Clifford says we used to laugh at this guy; she says he’s charming. Clifford says he’s a success is what he is. It’s so fascinating that this dynamic punctuates Allen’s work because, even as one of the most successful American film directors of all time, he still identifies with the purist artist who cannot find his audience, but will not compromise his work.

But why bother, in 2025, even to write a novel? The days when the whole nation seemed to be reading something and celebrating its creator are long past. If novels even continue to exist — it’s been a good 400+ year run since Don Quixote, and everyone should read the New York Times magazine article this past week about AI writing and I promise that my over-use of the em dash is organic and derived from the carbon-based life form that is myself, although surely just as annoying — the truth is that nobody gives a shit about anyone’s new novel. Nobody gives a shit about anything. There is no work of cultural significance capable of getting a meaningful percentage of the country talking. And if there were, it certainly wouldn’t be anything with serious artistic ambitions.

Baum struggles constantly with his failure to measure up to Dostoyevsky and Kafka. He even namechecks Saul Bellow and Philip Roth (though I’ve always suspected Allen didn’t really admire Roth). But the idea that any author will ever again have the cultural currency of a Philip Roth let alone a Fyodor Dostoevsky is impossible to imagine.

Our society is way too horrible and anyone deeply enjoying What’s With Baum? as they should is left to ponder its central contradiction. We all know life on this planet is miserable, empty, utterly unsatisfying, and ultimately pointless. And so goddamn delicious.