A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman

The book is an assault on the reader, a provocation and a challenge Grossman takes great risks, but in the end there is reward in a kind of redemption- and in any event, thank the heavens, the bad jokes stop.Īnother thoughtful, if odd and caustic, story from one of Israel’s greatest contemporary writers.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. The comic patter becomes ever more fraught, ever less funny as one audience member protests, “People come here to have a good time, it’s the weekend, you wanna clear your head, and this guy gives us Yom Kippur.” Yes, and not a little Freud, too. Along the way, Grossman ( To the End of the Land, 2010, etc.) unveils scenes from Israeli history and society: through Dov, he jokes that one woman’s hairdo was designed by the same engineer who built the nuclear plant at Dimona, and it’s not long before the Holocaust is dusted off and worked into the bit. Besides, there’s some payback in the offing for some long-ago slight: “The sweetness of the revenge I am about to be subjected to,” Avishai thinks. Avishai, the narrator, has known Dov since childhood and summer camp, and he’s amazed at the amount of hurt the comedian has stowed away, the better to make jokes out of, perhaps, but enough to keep an army of psychiatrists busy. To that end, he’s invited an old friend, Avishai Lazar, a former judge, to attend. He’s on the stage, it seems, to work out some personal issues and not a little bit of existential angst. He throws out a few insults, a few jibes, and asks them, “Why are you dumbasses laughing? That joke was about you!” But he’s no Don Rickles, not Dovelah. “Looks like my agent fucked me again,” he says, and the audience laughs appreciatively. Dov Greenstein is on stage in Caesarea-Hello, is this microphone working?-or somewhere, at any rate, any of a hundred dusty Israeli towns, marking time before the spotlights in a tiny bar.

A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman