Side Effects by Woody Allen

Worried? Frantic? Balding? Reach for Side Effects. For trying, middle-of-the-night anguish. When life is passing you buy. Or conspiring against you. Or both. You need Side Effects. When you know that no one loves you and never will. When the cat has eaten your valium and the doctor's answerphone just laughs at you. Take Side Effects and dissolve slowly into helpless hysteria.

Upon wandering around a car boot sale during my latest visit to the UK, which would have been completely guileless had it not been for the sheer novelty of going to a car boot sale, I came across a box of 70s paperbacks whose pricing proved that the owner was desperate to be relieved of them. The bright pink letters of Allen's name showed themselves upon further sifting, and I'm pretty sure that it was out of sheer shock (I was pretty convinced that Woody Allen's work was purely in film and theatre) that I made the purchase. 

For a while the paperback lay untouched in the vast pile of summer reads that failed to be completed as punctually as the label implies, and it was one of the myriad of books that I hauled back to Singapore. I didn't so much as open the pages until the following December, when the blurb's content proved to be of the utmost relevance to my state of mind (note that I did said state of mind, not being. Naturally my youthful -female- hairline is not receding). For the week-or-so leading up to the Christmas holiday these snippets of fiction made for great bedtime companions at the end of a stressful day, as it turns out that the book comprises 17 short stories, most -if not all- of which have been previously published in either The Kenyon Review, New Republic or The New Yorker.

As my father once aptly put it, I see Woody Allen as a bit of a kindred spirit. I absolutely love the scope of his (undeniably idiosyncratic) humour; pretentious, neurotic, self-aware, and intellectual to the point where you want to laugh out loud at his jokes for the sole purpose of making it apparent to others just how knowledgable you are. I knew nothing about Side Effects, but I had a great deal of faith in the guarantee of its hilarity, and I was genuinely curious as to how Allen's humour would translate to prose.

"Favourably" would be the answer to appease this curiosity. There is an inherent difference between Woody Allen's story-writing and Woody Allen's screenwriting, but it proves essential to ensure success as a short story. It was apparent in some short stories that Allen had channeled slightly more surreal aspects that his movies do not allow for. On a number of occasions both his style of writing and sense of humour reminded me very much of Douglas Adams, which was an extremely pleasant yet shocking find.

In summary, I have nothing but good things to say about this consolidation of Woody Allen's short stories. Whether you're a fan of his work or not, they're diverse and consistent in their undeniable hilarity. Like it claims to, these fragments of prose make for an excellent bedside companion for whenever you reach a stage of involuntary consciousness in the small hours.