A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman

“Well good evening, Mister Tony Soprano decked out in lemon meringue Welcome to our humble abode, and may you have a very crystal nacht. He has Dovaleh respond to the hecklers with the kind of comebacks we’ve all heard from weary standups.

Grossman does make a few concessions to the reader, who might – understandably – come looking for humour in a book about a comic. Suffice it to say that Dovaleh’s show is a form of self-interrogation and a confession: he is, remarks the narrator, like “a little rodent gnawing on himself”. To reveal anything more about the book’s plot and purpose would be to spoil its shock and surprises. The audience soon becomes restive and hostile – including the book’s narrator, retired district court justice Avishai Lazar, who has been invited to the show by Dovaleh, though at first it’s not clear why. He abuses the audience, refuses to humour them, and persuades them to join him in anti-Arab chants. Middle-aged, perilously thin, wearing ripped jeans, red braces and cowboy boots “adorned with silver sheriff stars”, he starts telling bad jokes. Dovaleh – “Dovaleh G, ladies and gentlemen, AKA Dovchick” – takes to the mic in a small club in Netanya, Israel. Second, Grossman presents the reader with the difficulty of confronting and then coming to understand – and finally to love – the deeply offensive comedian who is at the centre of the story, Dovaleh Greenstein. As with all good parables, it requires the reader to do some work in order to understand its meaning. A Horse Walks into a Bar – again translated by Jessica Cohen, who has long proved herself capable of keeping up with Grossman’s twists and turns of style – is more like a parable, about the loss of parents and the losses of a nation. His previous book, 2014’s Falling Out of Time, a deeply personal portrait of the loss of a son, was like a prose poem more prophecy than novel. First, Grossman no longer writes what we traditionally think of as novels: he has transcended genre or rather, he has descended deep into the vaults beneath.

A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman