Cool book alert

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

Fans of Woody Allen's movies may remember his 1984 comedy Broadway Danny Rose and the scenes at the Carnegie Deli, where the pastrami sandwiches are as thick as the New York accents and attitudes.

The Carnegie has a lot in common with Mere Anarchy, Allen's first collection of stories in 25 years. The book, like the Carnegie's menu, is great — if you like that kind of thing.

Like the Carnegie's one-pound sandwiches, Allen's literary slapstick is best appreciated if it's not overdone. It's not a book to be consumed in one or even two sittings.

Its 18 stories (10 previously published in The New Yorker; only eight are new) are variations on a shtick that mines the pomposity and insincerity of the entertainment industry, of which there is no limit.

Allen has a talent for taking something in the news, like the lawsuit over Michael Ovitz's severance package from the Walt Disney Co., and racheting up a sense of the absurd, with a surprise witness:

"Will the witness please state his name.

"Mickey Mouse.

"Please tell the court your occupation:

"Animated rodent."

From there, it's off to the one-liners, which, like most comedy, are harder than they look.
He invents Friedrich Nietzsche's Diet Book and serial killers who complain of bias whenever "three or more victims are killed the same way."

Allen knows a language that could be called agentese, a patois practiced by agents and producers in Hollywood and Broadway.

Fabian Wunch, a "peerless purveyor of schlock," is warming up when he says, "Buy me lunch and I may be able to bless you with partnership in a diversion the mere road companies of which will keep your children's children in rubies the size of breadfruit."

The project: a musical comedy set in Vienna, Fun de Siecle, in which a "sexbomb named Alma Mahler" (Gustav's wandering half) sings, "I'd Love to be Groped by Gropius."
The problem with such a collection is that it reveals Allen's tricks, which work well until you notice the repetition.

In one story, a "cupcake" named April Fleshpot appears in a robe "with nothing but well-dispersed protoplasm under it." In another, a starlet named Paula Pessary is a "fortuitous agglomeration of protoplasm."

Protoplasm isn't on the menu at the Carnegie, where one of Allen's characters, a hard-boiled private eye, celebrates after cracking a scam involving overpriced truffles. He orders "pastrami on rye with pickles and mustard — the stuff that dreams are made of."
Dream on, as April Fleshpot might say.