David Grossman’s new novel is about a standup, and it contains dozens of jokes. Some of the jokes are really quite funny; the standup, when he feels like it, is skilled at what he does. (He’s also impressively, gratifyingly filthy.) But be warned: this is no comic novel. It’s a novel about the limits of laughter.
Grossman has good reason to understand those limits: one of Israel’s most prominent writers, the author of such epoch-defining works as See Under: Love and The Book of Intimate Grammar, he suffered a scarcely imaginable personal tragedy in 2006 when his son Uri, a tank commander in the Israeli army, was killed in action in Lebanon. Humour, perhaps especially in a country like Israel, tends to have a protective role; both individually and collectively, it helps to smooth over trouble, make life bearable. A Horse Walks Into a Bar is an attempt to wrench off that protective cladding, and to contemplate – if only for an instant – the unadorned truth.
We first encounter Dovaleh G as he takes the stage in a comedy club in the West Bank-adjoining town of Netanya. (His opening gag is to express regret for not bringing a flak jacket: Netanya is evidently a place where protective cladding, of the soul if these days not so much the body, is advisable.) What follows is basically a long description of Dovaleh’s performance, in which every joke, every gesture, every reaction gets reported. The narrator is an audience member, an ex-judge whom Dovaleh was briefly friends with as a child. (Both are now in their late 50s.) Actually, the pair weren’t really friends; they merely attended the same private tuition classes. But recently, out of the blue, Dovaleh contacted the narrator and asked him to attend this performance. Despite having no interest in standup (“It’s really not something I relate to”), despite barely remembering his old tuition partner, the narrator agreed. Which explains his reluctant presence in the comedy club, performing the role of observer, of witness.
At first, it all seems more than a bit mystifying. Why did Dovaleh want his old “friend” to attend? And why should we care about their relationship – or, for that matter, about Dovaleh’s routine? (Standup, after all, is an in-the-moment art; even the best gags fall flat on the page.) The reader isn’t alone in feeling sceptical. It soon becomes clear that Dovaleh has no interest in entertaining his audience – at least not in the familiar, rules-of-comedy sense.
Though he just about manages to keep cranking out the jokes, he increasingly introduces less orthodox material, to which the audience responds with rising hostility. (By the gig’s end, most have walked out.) He violently hits himself. He gets involved in awkward exchanges with audience members. He tells jokes (such as one about a settler casually shooting “little Ahmed”) that go well beyond “edgy”. Above all, he makes it clear that his real objective for the evening – why, in fact, he’s there at all – is to get something off his chest, a terrible, harrowing story from childhood that he has kept secret his entire life. Only when he succeeds in recounting this tale (which he finally accomplishes at the end of the novel) do we properly grasp why the narrator’s presence was required.
I’ll admit, I remained sceptical for much of this book. It’s such a teasing, confounding premise – a failure of a comedy gig reconfigured as a novel – that my urge, like the audience’s, was to walk away. But my advice is this: buy it, and stick with it. For as the sound of laughter dies down, and the audience becomes increasingly threadbare, something else heaves into view – the lineaments of a pain so unbearable, so unspeakable, that it cannot be approached the normal way, only by this weirdly circuitous route. And it’s a pain, clearly, that Grossman knows all about.
• A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To order a copy for £12 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
