Typically, this piece is so full of Yiddishisms ("a tsimmes of talentless trombeniks"), bilious invective and ancient history ("Are you aware your instructor Silverfish was fired for editing a Hollywood movie because Henry Fonda was repeatedly cut in upside down?") that it sounds like vintage Allen. Only in the heat of filmmaker-financier tensions is there any whiff of Allen's recent history.
The stories in Mere Anarchy deliver the same joys and foibles that have been with its author from the start. Take his women: please. Allen still writes about hot babes and wifely harridans with very little in between. And he is funniest, not surprisingly, when he can be seen working hard rather than coasting. It has always been second nature for Allen to Mad-Lib a phrase while on autopilot ("a long dream in which Rodgers and Hart appeared at his window as parrots and simonized his car") without breaking a sweat.
But more often than not, the analogies fit. ("Actually I'd never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before.") And when the thoughtfulness shows (as with a renovation estimate that "waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations"), the effort pays off.
Among the more indelible lines in Mere Anarchy is this exchange, about a proposed musical on geniuses rattling around 19th-century Vienna:
"Freud unblocks Mahler so he can write again, and as a result Mahler triumphs over his lifelong fear of death."
"How does Mahler triumph over his lifelong fear of death?"
"By dying. I figured it out – it's really the only way."
Or, as the levitating lecher named Max in To Err Is Human — to Float, Divine says to the blond "apparition with the state-of-the-art pout":
"Here's my address. I'll be home tonight after eight. Drop in. I'll have you off your feet in no time."
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