If you're looking for a laff riot, maybe you should look elsewhere. I thought Woody Allen's previous book, his autobiography, was funnier. (Some Amazon reviewers were more amused than I, though, so…)
It's a novel, his first and (so far) only. Like his autobiography, there are no chapters. It's just one page after another. And it kind of reads like a novelization of a movie, one that could be funny. But, alas …
"Baum" of the title is the neurotic Asher Baum, a writer of plays, novels, and non-fiction, all relatively obscure and tepidly received by critics. He is on his third marriage. He (literally) talks to himself, not always in private. (Something that might work better in a movie.) He's haunted by worries about his wife's (imagined) infidelity, and he's continually tempted to engage in infidelities of his own.
The plot driver doesn't show up until about 70% of the way through the book. Up to then it's all character study. And those characters are ones that work words like "egregious" into their most emotional dialogue. (Which is actually kind of funny in itself.)
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