Literary Review
Art imitates strife
What’s With Baum?
Woody Allen (Swift, £18.99)
ONE of the recurring motifs in Woody Allen’s movies – along with gangsters, therapists and older men panting over younger women – is a character whose life is overtaken by the movies. (In Play It Again, Sam, for example, Allen’s character gets dating advice from Humphrey Bogart, fresh out of Casablanca.)
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” TS Eliot wrote, and Allen would finish that with “…and so they escape into fiction.” But Allen’s problem is the opposite: increasingly, his life is overtaking his art. Nowhere is that more apparent than in his new novel What’s With Baum?, published just two months before his 90th birthday.