When Truman Capote became an Oscar-worthy movie character and In Cold Blood bounced back onto bestseller lists, The New Yorker sportingly published yet another Woody Allen instant classic. Titled Above the Law, Below the Box Springs, it mimics the absurd solemnity and keen attention to minutiae that color self-important crime reporting in rural settings, lampooning a style well known to New Yorker readers.
"The land is arable and found primarily on the ground," Allen writes, about a lonely burg located "just above the bluffs that form Planck's constant." (Physicists, take note.) The victims were members of the Washburn family. "She loved fresh lightbulbs," a former housekeeper says of Mrs Washburn. "The linens we did once a year." As to the perpetrators of this heinous crime, the story concludes: "Whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent remains questionable, although studies show that the odds of criminals committing another crime drops by almost half after their execution."
Allen's writing has been this funny for 50 years. And his comic essays, like his films, have tried gambit after gambit, changing tone and subject matter without really altering their point of view. Just as Allen brought his own New York with him when he recently began making films in Europe, so he has sustained a writing style that remains impervious to the changing world around him.
As a young man he was just as likely to bring up the Gish sisters, Trotsky, Alma Mahler or "the glinting eyes of a claim jumper in a Republic Western" as he is today. Phrases like "a no-talent zombie momser," which appears in his new collection, Mere Anarchy, might have turned up anywhere in the Allen canon.
This summer Random House has had the temerity to bring forth dueling Allen volumes. In addition to the relatively new work in Mere Anarchy (about half of which is reprinted from The New Yorker), there is The Insanity Defense, a reprint of the dazzling, triple-decker anthology that combines his three other humor collections (Without Feathers, Side Effects and Getting Even).
Without question the best of these old pieces outshine the new work. The lightning bolts that created The Whore of Mensa (about prostitutes paid to discuss The Waste Land or explain Noam Chomsky) and The Kugelmass Episode (a pre-postmodern vision of Emma Bovary transported to New York to meet her new lover, a professor named Kugelmass, who suddenly finds himself dropped into Flaubert's classic) are not likely to strike again.
But when read in the shadow of his old stories Allen's new ones hold their own. Even when it creaks, Mere Anarchy is nostalgically enjoyable, and most of it sounds timelessly bright. It would be impossible to discern, even from a close reading of the piece called Calisthenics, Poison Ivy, Final Cut, where carbon dating would place it in the Allen comedy timeline. There, in the Borscht Belt, is Camp Melanoma, a haven for budding filmmakers, or, as the disgruntled parent of one camper puts it, "the ramshackle little Hooverville represented in your brochure as Hollywood in the Catskills."
This parent is wondering why he should have to split the US$16 million paid by Miramax for the summer project of his son, Algae, with the camp's director. The piece is structured as an exchange of increasingly heated letters between the parent and the proprietor, who will not let the film out of his possession. The proprietor writes ominously of his 6-year-old nephew: "He loves to take the negative out of the can and scrape the emulsion off with a penknife. Why? Do I know? I just know he scrapes and he kvells."
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