'A Horse Walks into a Bar': heartbreaking novel about a comedian self-imploding

13 June 2017 - 02:00 By Tymon Smith
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US comedian Lenny Bruce was hounded to an untimely death like the character in David Grossman's book.
US comedian Lenny Bruce was hounded to an untimely death like the character in David Grossman's book.
Image: DOVE/GETTY IMAGES

There's a famous live performance of Lenny Bruce, the seminal hip comedian who changed the face of the genre indelibly during the 1960s and was then hounded to his untimely death - from a drug overdose in 1966 - by repeated arrests for obscenity.

The performance takes place in a bar in San Francisco, one of the last cities in which Bruce was allowed to perform, in 1964.

It is a deeply unsettling and tragic capture of a man trapped in an obsessional cycle of dismay. Unable to ignore what's happened to him for the sake of giving the audience what they have come to see, Bruce spends just under two hours reading from court transcripts and trying to make his case to people who have no power to help him out of his by then bankrupt and insomniac existence.

He is in this moment the tragic embodiment of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's artist on the trapeze, tragically risking absurdity, about to fall to his creative death.

Israeli novelist David Grossman's taut, expertly controlled and heartbreakingly executed short novel (nominated for this year's Man Booker International Prize, which will be announced tomorrow) is a perfect illustration of that Bruce moment - in which the audience watches, first with morbid fascination and then with angry antipathy - a man drowning in front of them.

Dov Greenstein, a 57-year-old comedian whose moment in the spotlight has long since passed, is performing on his birthday in the depressing industrial town of Netanya.

He has invited a long- since-forgotten acquaintance from his childhood, former judge Avishai Lazar, to come and evaluate his death throes.

As Lazar narrates the story, we watch Greenstein self-implode as his tasteless (but often darkly hilarious) jokes about peaceniks, settlers, the Holocaust and Jewish parents give way to a sad and horribly awkward examination of the ghosts of his past and a realisation of how it was that he came to be the ghoulish, brash caricature of a man which he has spent a career cashing in on.

Set in a basement over two hours, Grossman's novel is difficult to put down but also uncomfortable to be with.

It's a testament to the author's ability that what the reader remains with after turning the final page, is a carefully crafted treatise on the relationship between artists and their audience, artists and their personal lives as well as a smart dissection of Israeli society and its relationship to Jewish identity and humour.

In the end one wonders whether, if Bruce had his own Lazar in the audience in 1964, he might have made it alive to 2003 to see himself posthumously pardoned for crimes he should never have been accused of committing in the first place.

• 'A Horse Walks into a Bar' by David Grossman, published by Jonathan Cape, is available in hardback from Exclusive Books for R302.

This article was originally published in The Times.

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