Nor could Dov, no matter how many living-room shows he put on for her. In the middle of Dov’s alleged “act,” someone in the crowd shouts down a disgruntled heckler: “Let him tell his story already!”Ī slight child beaten by his father an intelligent child devoted to his mother, unable to un-see the scars on her wrists - the place of the pulse - where a doctor saved her life with stitches but could not save her from herself.
For while Dov’s performance sags beneath a labyrinth of digressions, the novel remains independent - at times buoyantly so - of those same digressions which are the book. Grossman’s most impressive feat in this novel, his 11th, is a kind of neatly turned double-play. Which is what Dov’s audience does, in twos and threes, with each recounting of his childhood humiliations.īy the end of the show (and the end of the book), only a handful of people remains: a female dwarf who knew the comic in childhood as “a good boy,” the narrator (a retired judge named Avishai Lazar who briefly hung out with Dov decades ago), a waitress, and one or two others who cannot bring themselves to walk out. If their funny bone is not tickled, they grumble and leave. They want laughs at the end of a hard week. “Never told it to a single person, and tonight it’s going to happen.”īut people don’t pay good money to hear what you can get for a buck at a 12-step meeting.
“Wait patiently, my friends, because this is a story that, honest to God, I have never told in a show,” says Dov at a club in Netanya, the Israeli equivalent of Akron. Select another three - Navah Semel, say, and two more female writers from “the Land” - lay their triangles upside down upon Grossman’s, and you’ve got a literary Star of David.ĭov is a standup comic, the punchline to his own pathetic life as he pounds himself in the face onstage, breaking his glasses and drawing blood between Catskills schtick and Freudian complaint.Īnd while he’s a veteran of the laughs game - a 57-year-old well-practiced in telling jokes of the “a horse walks into a bar” variety (only more vulgar) - Dov has chosen this night to share the sad and troubling story of his life. Yehoshua, holds a mighty corner in the triangle of revered Israeli novelists. At the wheel and in the spotlight: a half-tummler/half-nebbish comic weirdo named Doveleh Greenstein.ĭov, just like Grossman, along with Amos Oz and A.B. Maybe that’s because Buddy Hackett never wrote his autobiography.įrom concept to execution (was it imagined whole or did the squeamishly discomfiting tale emerge in waves that startled the author?), in A Horse Walks into a Bar, David Grossman has created a hard, fast, and bumpy ride through the deserts of Israel and the soul.Ĭall it a 10-car pileup masquerading as a man’s life. I have never read a book like this, or even thought that one could exist.
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