What’s with Baum?

Woody Allen’s slyly entertaining first novel is a satirical tour de force that will have readers guessing who is who.

Asher Baum is quietly losing his mind. Can you blame him? A middle-aged Jewish journalist turned novelist and playwright, consumed with anxiety about everything under the sun, his turgid philosophical books receive tepid reviews and his prestigious New York publisher has dropped him. His third marriage is on the rocks and he suspects his handsome and successful younger brother may have seduced his Harvard-educated wife. He is uneasy with her close relationship with her son, a more successful author than he, and suspicious of her closeness with their neighbor in Connecticut. And in a moment of irrationality, he has impulsively tried to kiss a pretty young journalist during an interview that she is about to go public with.

Is it any wonder Baum has started talking to himself? Strangers shake their heads and walk around him on the street. Meanwhile he learns a startling secret that could cause havoc should he expose it. Should he keep it to himself or reveal it and blow up his marriage?

What’s with Baum? is Woody Allen’s first novel and it is everything you would expect of him—and more. A portrait of an intellectual crippled by neurotic concerns about the futility and emptiness of life; an amusing glimpse at the New York publishing establishment; above all, a highly entertaining, tightly plotted, beautifully wrought masterwork from one of America’s greatest and most versatile cinematic and literary talents. This comic novel will set the literary world on its ear. It is not to be missed.