Grossman no longer writes what we traditionally think of as novels: he has transcended genre; or rather, he has descended deep into the vaults beneath ... A Horse Walks into a Bar – again translated by Jessica Cohen, who has long proved herself capable of keeping up with Grossman’s twists and turns of style – is more like a parable, about the loss of parents and the losses of a nation. As with all good parables, it requires the reader to do some work in order to understand its meaning ... Grossman does make a few concessions to the reader, who might – understandably – come looking for humour in a book about a comic...But Grossman’s true interests lie elsewhere: A Horse Walks into a Bar is not a book about standup comedy. It is a book about art, and the relationship of suffering to art ... This isn’t just a book about Israel: it’s about people and societies horribly malfunctioning. Sometimes we can only apprehend these truths through story – and Grossman, like Dovaleh, has become a master of the truth-telling tale. 'What is he selling them?' wonders the judge. 'What is he selling himself?' These are important questions at this moment in history, a time of trickery and lies. This is a novel for our new Age of Offence – offence easily taken and endlessly performed.

...[a] brilliant, blistering novel ... Grossman masterfully weaves several complex strands of narrative. First there are Dovaleh’s stories, particularly a single story that takes most of the book to unfold and aims at the heart of his self-loathing...Meanwhile, in the spaces between Dovaleh’s riffs, the retired judge recalls his late wife and his brief childhood friendship with the comedian. Avishai sees in advance that he tangentially figures in the principal story, the traumatic event that has haunted Dovaleh’s life ... After a lifetime of writing, Grossman is acknowledging that by entertaining his readers, he, too, has implicated them in his conceits, his failings and his cruelties. With Dovaleh, Grossman has created a character who’s captivating and horrific and a stand-up routine that’s disgusting and authentically human. I can hardly say how the book achieves its bewitching effects. It all happened so fast.

...[a] magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance ... This is material Grossman has explored previously; indeed, some of it mirrors his own biography. But never has he presented it in one sustained performative howl, combining the comic dexterity of a Louis C.K. with a Portnoyish level of detail ... Its technical proficiency is astounding. At 194 pages, there is nothing extraneous, not one comma, not one word, not one drop of a comic’s sweat ... Grossman has taken it to a new level. He has left a trail of blood and sweat on the page that only a true master — a Lenny Bruce, a Franz Kafka — could dream of replicating.

Grossman renders in second-by-second detail the comedian’s art of keeping an audience on a knife-edge with his verbal acrobatics...But as Dov’s act takes a steadily darker turn, the reader’s unease mounts along with that of his audience ... A Horse Walks Into A Bar is, at one level, an extended riff on Jewish humour and Grossman draws on a plentiful stock of much-loved gags, but we grimace as we grin, because equally the novel is a searing dissection of the more dangerous functions of humour ... Few writers hold a more unflinching mirror up to Israeli society than Grossman, for which he has been both hailed and reviled by Israelis and Palestinians alike. His work stubbornly refuses to flatter or console, but it is also suffused with compassion, acutely attuned to the complexity of individual lives and the solutions people find to the challenge of that complexity ... a work of sombre brilliance and disquieting rage, an unsparing exploration of the seductive spell of escapism.

Grossman takes a lot of risks with A Horse Walks into a Bar, and every one of them pays off spectacularly well. Writing about a stand-up comedy set isn't easy; comic performances — even the bad ones — have a distinctive rhythm that can be difficult to recreate. But Grossman and translator Jessica Cohen do a wonderful job with Greenstein's long, sometimes borderline incoherent rants. It's also hard to pull off a novel set in the space of two hours, but Grossman's timing is perfect; the story feels urgent, and the reader can almost imagine being trapped in the comedy club with the increasingly confused audience ... A Horse Walks into a Bar is a novel as beautiful as it is unusual, and it's nearly impossible to put down. In the end, it's not as much about comedy as it is about witness: Greenstein needs someone to validate his pain, to let him know that he really has survived a life that's kicked him time and time again. As Lazar reflects toward the end of the novel, 'I believe he is reminding me of his request: that thing that comes out of a person without his control. That's what he wanted me to tell him. It cannot be put into words, I realize, and that must be the point of it.' It's hard to put any kind of pain into words, but Grossman does it absolutely perfectly.

Avishai, who was dismissed from the bench for intemperate comments in open court, recognizes a secret affinity with Dov. Not so secret is Avishai’s affinity with the reader, who might be turned off by Dov’s abrasiveness but keeps turning pages. Like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, he is both enraging and engaging. Grossman’s short, blunt novel is as cunning and compelling as the stand-up guy at its center. In this funnyman’s sad, grotesque performance, Grossman reaffirms his power to entertain and unnerve.

It takes an author of Mr Grossman’s stature to channel not a failed stand-up but a shockingly effective one, and to give him salty, scabrous gags that—in Jessica Cohen’s savoury translation—raise a guilty laugh. Dovaleh’s edgy, 'tightrope-walking' shtick narrows into a lacerating narrative of the cadet camp where, at 14, he learned of a parent’s death. The tortured judge’s own misery is compounded by the recent death of his wife. As the punters drift away, Mr Grossman unearths the twisted roots of both men’s self-disgust.

The violence that A Horse Walks into a Bar explores is more private and intimate. Its central interest is not the vicious treatment of vulnerable others but the cruelty that wells up within families, circulates like a poison in tight-knit groups, and finally turns inward against the self. Grossman’s literary kinship here is not with Swift’s 'A Modest Proposal' but rather with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Kafka’s The Judgment ... No suicidal leap from the bridge, but the novel stages a comparable act of self-destruction, and in the course of doing so, it enters into the Kafka-zone where tragedy and comedy are braided together ... [a] searing and poignant novel.

Here, well translated by Jessica Cohen, Grossman seems to be channeling Philip Roth, circa Portnoy’s Complaint, with a colloquial voice that badgers, bullies, berates and beseeches as the hapless narrator tries to come to terms with the primal wound of his past ... Lazar’s presence at the club feels like a false construct, made more to enhance plot points than emotional engagement ... Grossman’s tragic vision never leaves him, even if the vehicle here is more reminiscent of Laurence Olivier’s performance as the failed actor in John Osborne’s The Entertainer than the fictional landscapes we are familiar with from this author.