I remember flipping when I found a copy of Without Feathers in my high school library. Between that, Side Effects and Getting Even, Allen's anarchic, hyperliterate absurdism hit me right as I was getting exposed to Monty Python and developing an interest in the aggressively nonsensical. When Mere Anarchy came out, a lot of the reviews dinged it for being overly intellectual, as though Allen was struggling to achieve (or retain) an elite authorial status via ostentatious namedropping and overambitious lexiconography. Which kept me from really jumping at it, but when I saw it in the stacks on my latest library run, I figured it'd be the perfect nightcap-book for a week or so.
And those guys? They are WRONG. Not that the book's not disappointing -- it only really has a few flashes that come close to the demented genius of Without Feathers and Side Effects -- but Allen's fault is not one of excessive ambition. It's a weird charge to begin with -- his earlier essay collections featured humor pieces that relied on at least relative familiarity with the works of Ibsen and Strindberg, Talmudic study, and philosophers of all stripes. If anything, what makes Mere Anarchy a bit of a letdown is that Allen tends to couch his unhinged brainstorms in mundane scenarios. About half the pieces are formatted as short narrative fiction, but the bulk of the stories consist of characters pitching ideas to each other -- it's a weird excess that doesn't add anything, and if anything blunts the impact of the mad notions (a Three Stooges novelization, for example) being pitched. Characters are given catskills-comic fake names ("E. Coli Biggs"), and so forth.
But there are a few really solid pieces here (Nietzche's diet feels pretty classic-Allen), but by and large, he's trying to broaden his style (at least it feels that way) and it's just a little flatter than it has, in the past, been.
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