What’s With Baum?, by 89-year-old debut novelist Woody Allen, is about … a bespectacled Jewish novelist. Asher Baum, anxious and hypochondriac, with two ex-wives, a handsome home in Connecticut and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, finds himself having cocktails in Bemelmans Bar with an attractive young woman. Whatever shocks you might expect from this novel, the shock of the new isn’t one of them.

Reading What’s With Baum? is an eerie, almost unearthly experience, like being taken to some secret Narnia part of New York where a new Neil Simon play is about to open, or a record store where you can check out a Burt Bacharach LP in the listening booth, or a TV studio where you can watch a live taping of the Dick Cavett Show, with Robert Wagner, Rex Reed and Gore Vidal. Allen’s mannerisms, his themes, his comedy – and there are some very good gags here – are just the same as they ever were. In fact, this novel is more fluent, more plausible on its own terms, than any of his recent movies – though it finally collapses into perfunctory and unresolved farcical silliness in a very familiar way.

So: will Allen use the more confessional interior possibilities of the novel to address some of the controversy about him personally, such as the 1992 allegation of sexual assault made by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow? Will he investigate the culture wars, which in his case flared up recently with a visit to the Moscow film festival? The answer is no, although it seems at first as if he might do all these things – as if, in fact, they are the whole point of his story.

Asher Baum has recently given an interview promoting his latest book to a young Japanese-American journalist called Cindy Tanaka (or as Baum distractedly says: “Cindy Mindy Woo – the Chinese one whatever her name was”), on whose shoulders he afterwards placed his hands and to whom he gave a deeply misjudged and inappropriate kiss. Now Baum’s agent is on the phone warning him that the interviewer is outraged, that the piece is going to be a #MeToo takedown, and that Baum’s career – moribund in any case – is now finished.

The reader may be on tenterhooks to find out how Baum’s shruggingly ironic, nervily sardonic worldview is going to hold up in the middle of this imminent political storm – and, by that token, what it is like to be Woody Allen. But the storm never arrives. Cindy Tanaka never appears in her own person in the story, which effectively finishes before the article comes out.

The point is rather to show Baum’s general comic unravelling, and the surfacing of all his neuroses. Like Herzog’s compulsive letter writing in Saul Bellow’s novel of the same name, Baum starts openly talking to himself, a jabbering dialogue of self-confrontation and self-exculpation. Subjects include his more successful businessman brother (whom he suspects of having had a fling with his third wife) and an intellectual mentor who, to Baum’s consternation, intends to abandon the life of the mind to play tambourine in a New Orleans jazz band called the White Chocolate Dandies.

But most importantly there is Baum’s wife, Connie, and her insufferable son – and Baum’s stepson – Thane. Here is where the novel comes to life. As a kid, when Connie and Baum were first dating, Thane was an appalling brat. Now, while Baum’s career flounders, with nasty reviews and tanking sales, Thane suddenly becomes a literary superstar with a smash-hit novel called The Bevelled Heart. It’s a title that annoys the hell out of Baum, eaten up as he is with envious rage, having apparently become Salieri to this appalling young Mozart.

There are plenty of nice lines along the way. Baum despises animals for being “failed humans”. He says the sexual signal “goes round and round endlessly, like radar” and that guilt is that “powerful enveloping element as prevalent as oxygen and perhaps just as necessary”. Poor Baum just has to keep working, like Sisyphus: “Does anyone give a damn that I’m pushing a rock up a hill? And if I ever get it up there, then what the hell have I got? A rock on a hill.” Baum, and his creator, are still pushing.