Side Effects
Pinsker, Sanford
Angst & despair, bagels & lox SIDE EFFECTS Woody Allen Random House, $8.95, 149 pp. Stanford Pinsker Side Effects, Woody Allen's third collection of comic writing, is preoccupied with the...
...What was required was an Existential Alka-Seltzer—a product sold in many Left Bank drugstores...
...Kugelmass is skeptical, but he finally settles on Madame Bovary...
...Stanford Pinsker Side Effects, Woody Allen's third collection of comic writing, is preoccupied with the fate of modern man, that endangered species Allen defines as "any person born after Nietzsche's edict that 'God is dead,' but before the hit recording 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand'.'' The sixteen sketches—which rake over the usual Allen coals of love and death, angst and despair, bagels and lox— appeared originally in magazines like The New Yorker, The New Republic and the reincarnated Kenyon Review...
...He meets Emma (who speaks "in the same fine English translation as the paperback") and they soon fall passionately in love...
...Cloquet had also found it helpful after eating Mexican food...
...A teacher in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, sighed and thought, Jesus, these kids, with their pot and acid...
...As he wails to his psychiatrist: "I need softness, I need flirtation . . . before it's too late I want to love in Venice, trade quips at '21,' and exchange coy glances over red wine and candlelight...
...This was an existential nausea, caused by his intense awareness of the contingency of life, and could not be relieved with an ordinary Alka-Seltzer...
...There is a sense in which Kugelmass is an avatar of Woody Allen, but also a deeper, scarier sense in which he is us...
...The rest, as they say, is Kugelmass's fantasy come all too true...
...The dilemma, of course, is that modernist ideas have been debased and contemporary "ideas" are vacuous...
...I guess it's not in the cards," he chortles...
...opt for the latter and you are reduced to saying "you know" far more than is good for any of us...
...But small reservations aside, the general level of Side Effects makes it painfully clear that Woody Allen has no serious competition as our generation's most sophisticated, most significant humorist...
...As he tells us poignantly in "My Speech to the Graduates": Religion too has unfortunately let us down...
...It is no coincidence that most of these comic giants are associated with The New Yorker magazine, nor is it surprising that Allen would want to count himself in their number...
...His sketches are a way of gauging what happens when the solemn manifestoes of Kierkegaard or Heidegger or Kafka become the stuff of college courses...
...Without a cursory understanding of French existentialists like Sartre and Camus, what is one to make of the following: Now Cloquet stepped closer to Brisseau's sleeping hulk and again cocked the pistol...
...Meanwhile, Allen adds his comic asides to our century's stockpile of images for ontological frustration...
...He is what we fashionably call "alienated...
...A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary...
...His congenial turf is not restricted to what passes for our popular culture and this, more than anything else, separates his humor from the trendy, and shallower, highjinks of "Saturday Night Live" or stand-up comics like Steve Martin and David Brenner...
...And in "The Kugelmass Episode," he has written a comic fantasy that is a worthy successor to James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty...
...But to twist a phrase made famous by Harold Ross, The New Yorker's founder: Woody Allen does not write for the pimply teenager from Dubuque...
...Consider the following from "By Destiny Denied": Pinchuck is a nervous man who fishes in his spare time but has not caught anything since 1923...
...not every non sequitur manages to avoid the sophomore slump...
...But when an acquaintance pointed out that he was casting his line into a jar of sweet cream he grew uneasy...
...I have quoted Woody Allen at length, partly because readers expect it (nothing could be deadlier or more disappointing than an Allen review sans Allen), and partly because I want to focus on those elements which distinguish his work from the current competition...
...Commonweal: 636...
...Allen's imagination works best in that special realm where the High Brow idea and the urban (read: Jewish) detail are forced to share space, often on opposing sides of a semi-colon...
...He has seen the ravages of war, he has known natural catastrophes, he has been to singles bars...
...Granted, much of the humor in Side Effects has a familiar ring...
...Miguel de Unamuno writes blithely of the "eternal persistence of consciousness," but this is no easy feat...
...There is, however, a catch: What he didn't realize was that at this very moment students in various classrooms across the country were saying to their teachers,'' Who is this character on page 100...
...And that last dimension is what makes Side Effects a document of the Zeitgeist as well as a very, very funny book...
...He suffers, in short, from that great leveler of the contemporary man: mid-life crisis...
...What looks for all the world like a stream-of-very-funny-consciousness is, in fact, the product of hard work and a half-dozen drafts...
...In "Remembering Needleman," for example, we are told that Sandor Needleman "differentiated between existence and Existence, and knew that one was preferable, but could never remember which . . . 'God is silent,' he was fond of saying, 'now if we can only get Man to shut up.'" Or in "The Lunatic's Tale," we are encouraged to shower "an appropriate hostility toward all deserving targets: politicians, television, facelifts, the architecture of housing projects, men in leisure suits, film courses, and people who begin sentences with 'basically...
...Help comes in the form of a broken-down magician named Persky who, for $20 a trip, can transport Kugelmass (via a cheap-looking Chinese cabinet and some hocus-pocus) into any novel of his choice...
...Sidney Kugelmass is a professor of humanities at City College and a man desperate to have an extramarital affair...
...The discipline comic writing requires makes one literary, bookish, part of a Tradition that includes the likes of Robert Benchley, George Ade, James Thurber, E. B. White and S. J. Perelman...
...Granted, there are lesser moments in Side Effects...
...Those who catch up on the latest news in Rolling Stone or Crawdaddy or who think that "Saturday Night Live" is sooooo funny will have a tough time with Side Effects...
...That much said, however, let me now suggest that Woody Allen's comic writing differs from his previous work as a stand-up comedian and from his ongoing career as a filmmaker, however much the same preoccupations persist...
...He finds himself in the midst of a crisis of faith...
...It was an enormous pill, the size of an automobile hubcap, that, dissolved in water, took away the queasy feeling induced by too much Commonweal: 634 awareness of life...
...What goes through their minds...
...For example, in a parody of the Socratic 7 November 1980: 635 dialogues one character can't quite resist pointing out that Isosoles "has a great idea for a new triangle.'' One wishes that he would have, because discretion is at least as much a part of humor as it is of valor...
...Particularly when reading Thackeray . . . Contemporary man, of course, has no such peace of mind...
...To give away more of the plot would be unfair, but suffice to say the story reveals as much about our cultural moment as Thurber's tale did about his...
...Put another way: one of the more pleasant' 'side effects'' of modernist culture is Woody Allen's humor...
...A feeling of nausea swept over him as he contemplated the implications of his action...
...The result is a neurotic stand-off, one that, for Woody Allen, is likely to produce more collections of humor and more films than it is solutions...
...Choose the former and you run the risk of sounding pretentious...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 20
