The first publication from Woody Allen in more than 25 years is quite an event. On the one hand, he is surely a genius in that he has created his own unique, instantly recognisable world. On the other hand, it is a very small world. Along with his numerous other neuroses, Allen suffers from claustrophobia. So might his readers.
All the usual suspects are here: talentless writers, wannabe actors, sharkish agents, mad psychoanalysts. As for location, well, he does take us to India at one point, but this is very much "India", where a bandit chieftain says things such as "this zero-talent potzer"; while his Savile Row-suited Englishmen talk about guineas and faucets. So minimal an attempt is made at authenticity, you could almost admire it. Wherever you are, you're still in Allens-berg, a parochial little stretch of Manhattan where nothing ever changes and whose relation to the real world is tangential at best.
If the point of this collection is humour, then there aren't enough laughs. If satire, then it's hardly Swiftian. The targets include new-age idiocy, psychoanalysis and the vulgarity of Hollywood. Ground-breaking it isn't. And the structure of the stories is woeful, neat endings rare. You can almost hear them chugging to a standstill as the steam runs out. On the positive side, there is a surprising, extravagant inventiveness of language, deliberately ludicrous essays in "elegant variation", and Allen has clearly been mugging up on the joys of Yiddish. Some sentences require real concentration. "Faulkner and Fitzgerald too leased their gifts to ex-schmatte moguls who stacked the Garden of Allah with scriveners brought west to spitball box-office reveries." Is that so? And still in the film world, "What you've done is taken a record budget of 200m iron men and fabricated a concrete latke that opened tobupkis." You may need a dictionary. Not that Allen has suddenly become fine-tuned to contemporary American speech patterns. This style, too, is entirely his own.
There are a few good laughs here. I liked the character "cursed with an adenoidal whine that hatches in the throat and reverberates off his septum like a kazoo", the psychoanalyst called Noah Untermensch, and the "Prayer Jockey" Moe Bottomfeeder. Sometimes, those showy, sophomoric jokes pay off, as in the restaurant where "for as little as $250 per person, one could eat like Ivan Denisovich". Sometimes they don't. The piece about Nietzsche's dietary habits (Thus Ate Zarathustra) is grimly unfunny. And the classic Allen trick of going from metaphysical despair to quotidian peeve in one sentence has been done a bit too often. "Not only is our time on earth limited but most kitchens close at 10." I prefer his older, "Not only is there no God but try getting a plumber on Sundays."
One doesn't want to come over all 1980s-feminist, but the women here are either appalling harridans or speechless pneumatic dolls: one is "a miraculously fabricated blonde who doubled as secretary and masseuse"; another, similarly, has "blonde hair, pillow lips, and twin dirigibles that stretched her silk blouse to the breaking point"; a third has "skin tones in a thong [that] put a smile on my face that could only be chipped off with a chisel". But there are some gems that really do work. Nanny Dearest is about a wealthy New York couple who find that their nanny has written a scathing account of their lives. "Harvey Bidnick is a witless boor, a motor-mouthed little proton who fancies himself amusing but numbs his guests with relentless one-liners unfunny even on the borscht circuit 50 years ago"; his wife fares no better, "a portly ice queen with tapioca thighs".
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More than half these stories have appeared in The New Yorker, where their smart, allusive, highly polished, pseudo-satirical and not-very-funny tone must go down well. For the most part, they provoke wry smiles of cerebral amusement rather than belly laughs: what you would expect, given Allen's recent film output. The general feeling is tired. A little late-period Allen goes a long way.
Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen
Ebury £12.99 pp160
Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)