What's with Baum? A love story.

The first time I saw a film by Woody Allen I was 16 — old enough to fall in love with the genius, rhythm, and wit, and young enough to believe they might save me one day. 

31 years later, I find myself wondering what qualities a perfect novel should possess, if perfection were still a defensible ambition.

To be honest, Woody Allen remains one of the very few figures capable of lending genuine significance to our existence. Did he need to write a novel? Certainly not. This is a man who has proven himself exhaustively—cultivated to the point of intimidation, effortlessly impressive, and possessed of a humour that has dignified human life by making it, at the very least, tolerable.

Setting aside the grim allegations that turned his life into a public nightmare, I cannot help returning to the simple fact that his jokes and films have repeatedly made my day. That is why I bought What’s with Baum?, read What’s with Baum?, and loved What’s with Baum?.

Baum is an almost-talented writer with an almost-serene and moderately satisfying life. He is married to an almost-crazy woman and haunted by the loss of his one true love and success. He is also losing himself, for a reason both banal and devastating: no one loves him—at home or anywhere else.

Wildly entertaining, What’s with Baum could easily have been titled The Human Condition without provoking so much as a raised eyebrow. Woody Allen performs a small miracle every time he opens his mouth: he proves that laughing at human mediocrity is not only possible, but oddly consoling.

The book unfolds as a puzzling kaleidoscope of human endurance. The pages turn quickly, yet the weight of personal failure accumulates steadily, until Baum grows suspicious of everyone around him—especially those bound to him by family ties.

Reading What’s with Baum? feels like living the protagonist’s life and, more impressively, wandering inside one of Allen’s films.

There is a meaningful difference between being a film director and becoming a legend—a transformation Allen completed long ago. His first novel pulls the reader directly into the texture of his screenplays. As in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the characters embody the privileged American bourgeoisie that helped shape the country’s cultural backbone—its tastes, its intellectual pretensions, its existential anxieties.

Allen reminds us that even a life spent on sofas and polite handshakes can be claustrophobic, maddening, and narratively dense. That is why, page after page, we regret not already having seen Baum’s life projected onto a screen. The novel contains echoes of many Allen masterpieces, distilled into prose.

Only Woody Allen could render the anguish of failed potential so irresistibly entertaining. Just when you think you know where the story is going, it veers—unexpectedly—into crime-novel territory. Laden with regret and punctuated by some of the funniest moments in contemporary literature, What’s with Baum? is as candid as Match Point, with one crucial difference: here, we are granted a well-deserved happy ending.

Baum forces you to reconsider your entire existence: Is my life so miserable and mediocre? Should I break with my despicable aunties who still ask me when am I supposed to win the Nobel Prize for literature? But in an enjoyable way: We all know someone who talks to themselves at the supermarket counter.

Being neglected by one’s family and never quite satisfying one’s editor: most of the idiosyncrasies of modern careerists are compressed into Baum’s existence.

Allen understands that timing and fortune are everything, and he delivers a novel that absorbs the reader completely—with its rhythm, its shifting frames, its cinematic sense of scene.

We are waiting for the film.
Definitely.