Read “What’s with Baum?” without knowing who wrote it and you might think it’s a “straightforwardly unremarkable” novel charting the “midlife crises of a neurotic, vaguely lecherous writer”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent . “But, of course, we do know the author of ‘Baum’. And that author is 89-year-old filmmaker Woody Allen.”

Allen’s novel – his first – comes five years after the release of his memoir, “Apropos of Nothing”, and arrives at a time when his film career appears to have “ tailed off ” following allegations (which he vehemently denies) that he sexually abused his daughter in the early 1990s.

‘Dancing around taboos’

“What’s with Baum?” is “almost exactly what you’d expect from Woody Allen the novelist”, said Darragh McManus in the Irish Independent . The action f

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