A Horse Walks Into a Bar

I wanted to read David Grossman's A Horse Walks Into a Bar for two reasons: one, it won the Man Booker International Prize last year, and two, the title is the set-up to my favorite joke: "A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, 'Why the long face?'" Grossman uses a different joke as a punchline, but he has written a book with many good jokes in it, such as: "So the snail walks into a police station and says to the desk sergeant, ‘Two turtles attacked me!’ Desk sergeant opens up a file and says, ‘Describe exactly what happened.’ Snail says, ‘I don’t really remember, it all happened so fast.’ ”

A Horse Walks Into a Bar is basically one comedian's long rant. Doveleh G, a 57-year-old hapless comic, is performing at a club. He proceeds to sort of have a nervous breakdown in front of the audience, which includes the narrator, a retired judge who knew Dov as a boy.

This is a good idea for a book, and it's also a treacherous one, as when you write about a comic he has to be funny, or no one will believe he's a comic. Dov is funny: “I swear to God, the last time in my life I didn’t have any problems was when I still had a foreskin.” (Did I mention that the book is set in Israel, and was translated from the Hebrew?) But the audience gets skittish when he starts revealing things about his life, and he keeps track of those who leaves by making hash marks on a blackboard. The reader may want to leave at some parts, but I stuck with it, as the last third of the book is Dov telling a story about when he was a a military camp (where the judge was, also) and is summoned to a funeral, but whose he is not told.

Stand-up comedians, as we all know, are some of the most neurotic people on Earth, and Dov fits the bill. The way the judge describes him, he's cadaverous, wearing ridiculous cowboy boots. Occasionally he hits himself, or twirls around the stage like an airplane. Every so often we get flashbacks by the judge of he and young Dov as friends, but when Dov is bullied by boys at camp (he's put into a duffel bag and tossed around, or an entire salt shaker is dumped in his soup, the judge does nothing).

But as readers, we are like the audience members. We came for jokes, and Dov drags out that last story so long the suspense of who died deflated like a balloon. This is not an easy book to read, partly because of witnessing a man basically self-destructing, and also because the different narratives can get confusing. A few times I had to go back a few pages to see who was talking.

But a few more jokes. This one is my favorite. It's Dov telling about when he sees an old man sitting on a park bench, crying. The old man tells him he has a young beautiful wife. "Old guy says, ‘I’ll tell you. We start every day with two hours of wild sex, then she makes me some pomegranate juice for the iron, and I go to the doctor’s office. I come back, we have more wild sex, and she makes me a spinach quiche for the antioxidants. In the afternoon I play cards with the guys at the club, I come home, we have wild sex into the night, and this is how it goes, day after day…’ ‘Sounds fantastic!’ I tell him. ‘I’d like me some of that! But then why are you crying?’ Old guy thinks for a minute and says, ‘I can’t remember where I live.’ ”