Short StoriesWoody Allen's new book is a mixed bag, but when he's on form, he's still hard to beat, writes Claire Kilroy
Who doesn't harbour a soft spot for Woody Allen? No mix tape, in my day, was complete without an extract from his early stand-up comedy career. His schtick was to offer the audience a coping mechanism to help deal with the absurdity of life, a coping mechanism which - and here's the beauty of the Allenesque endeavour - was in itself absurd. Fighting fire with fire, if you like. Life, as it befell the average Woody Allen protagonist, could be summarised by his 1977 Annie Hall line: "I'm dealin' with two guys named Cheech."
This line is gold when it comes to interacting with dunderheads, and let's face it, they are legion. It doesn't have to be two guys; one guy will do. It doesn't have to be a guy at all - the sentiment is equally applicable to men, women, public servants, political cabinets - anyone who sacrifices logic to obstinacy. Anyone who gets in your way. Not only is the line a cunning critique of a certain mindset: it is a method of managing your expectations. There are some situations that you're just not going to win, and it's not you: it's them. It's the two guys named Cheech. They're so stupid, you couldn't insult them.
Allen's most memorable heroes - or antiheroes, rather - were heroic because they were redeemable. They were redeemable because, at heart, they were old softies. They were us. We recognised their dilemmas. We felt their pain. So what's up with Woody's new humour collection? His protagonists have been replaced by bitter, cynical, tight-fisted old men. Where are the two guys named Cheech? Where is the Everyman figure who rails against them to no avail? It has all gone a little sour.
Part of the problem is the misogyny. There goes half your audience. Women, throughout the collection, are no better than an expense. They are either young, racked and extortionist, or old, ugly and extortionist. It's all about the Bergdorf charge account. If you can't keep up the repayments, you lose the blonde. Or if she's old and ugly, you can't lose her at all. The two guys named Cheech were more fun.
A more serious problem, however, this being a humour collection, is that several of the stories are not funny. They are curiously toneless, like e-mails or texts. An ironical mention of a name or movement from the western art/music/philosophy tradition does not a good joke make. The consistently weak endings constitute such an obvious flaw that you have to question the editorial process this book underwent. Half of the material was first published in the New Yorker: Did they go through the hands of an editor in a publishing house before going into book form ?
BUT IT'S NOT all bad. Three or four of the pieces are outstandingly funny, which begs the question: why include the stoopid ones? Allen is on top form when he sticks to the world he knows, namely, that of writing and cinema. In This Nib For Hire, he combines both to wonderful comic effect. Flanders Mealworm, a broke literary writer whose latest book is "remaindered in the kindling section" accepts a commission to write a "novelization", a novelisation being when "a movie does good numbers, the producer hires some zombie to make a book out of it. Y'know, an exploitation paperback - strictly for lowbrows". So Mealworm applies his existentialist sensibility to The Three Stooges: "With pent-up fury that masked years of angst over the empty absurdity of man's fate, the one named Moe smashed the crockery."
In Surprise Rocks Disney Trial, Mickey Mouse reports in court that he "stopped seeing Daffy Duck when he became a Scientologist", and that "Donald Duck got drunk and made a pass at Nicole Kidman. It was extremely embarrassing because at the time she and Tom Cruise were still married. Donald was rather hostile to Tom, I recall, and felt Tom was being offered all the roles he wanted".
The stand-out piece from the collection is the laugh-out-loud Above the Law, Below the Box Strings, which is a gentle satire of both the frontier movie and the detective genre. "Tobias was a horse whisperer at a ranch in Texas, but she suffered a nervous breakdown when a horse whispered back." "Pugh [ lit] yet another cigarette. Pugh is aware of the health hazards of smoking and so uses only chocolate cigarettes."
Woody Allen is not Beckett. When he portrays a fundamentally inimical universe in which society is alienated, loveless, cruel, and the worst offenders are the protagonists themselves, he loses his touch and, with it, his reader. But when he relents and sees the funny side - when he's dealing with two guys named Cheech - there are few who can surpass him.
Claire Kilroy's second novel, Tenderwire, (Faber) is out now in paperback
Mere Anarchy By Woody Allen Ebury Press, 160pp. £12.99