The Book Reviewer as Woody Allen

A friend emails to ask if Woody Allen is slipping book reviewers into The New Yorker under a pen name. His proof? This passage from a review in this week's issue:

In 1904, when Walser was twenty-six, he saw his first book published, a collection of essays on everything and nothing by the fictional naif Fritz Kocher. Among Kocher's observations are that leaves fall to the ground in autumn, that country fairs are useful and pleasant, and that "more people perish than want to." Walser had assembled the essays over several years, while working intermittently in and around Zurich and Bern, and once they had appeared between two covers he felt emboldened to move to Berlin and seek his fortune there.

In Berlin, he moved in with his brother Karl (a notable illustrator and stage-set designer) and attempted to live by his pen. He didn't do badly at first, and his literary success, along with his brother's connections, secured him a place in German artistic circles, where he was sometimes governed by an imp of the perverse. As adolescents, he and Karl had apparently perfected the art of perching in a high window and throwing their hats onto the heads of passersby, and their mischief persisted in adulthood. One evening at a party, they challenged the famous playwright Frank Wedekind to a bout of Hosenlupf (literally, "trouser-hoist", a Swiss wrestling variant that makes inventive use of an opponent's waistband. When Wedekind, discomfited, fled to a cafe, his tormentors pursued him, hailing him with friendly, if cryptic, cries of "Muttonhead!" -- and causing him to get caught up in a revolving door. On another occasion, in a literary salon, Walser interrupted the high-flown talk by seizing a young Englishwoman's leg and praising her small feet.

This sort of behavior made Walser stand out in Berlin, as did his Swiss-German dialect and his lack of formal education. And his acquaintances -- he had few friends and, it seems, in the course of his life, not a single lover of either -- were thereby confronted with the same question as his readers: where did innocence and joy end and playacting begin? In later years, stung by his failure to be taken seriously as a writer, Walser claimed that the ingenuousness was just an act: "My vocation, my mission, consists mainly in making every effort to keep my audience believing that I am truly simple. I give them the illusion that unspoiledness and naivete still exist." But it can be hard to tell. When Walser met Lenin in Zurich, during the war, all he had to say was "So you, too, like fruitcake?" -- Still Small Voice by "Benjamin Kunkel" in The New Yorker. Yes, the New Yorker.