The comic patter becomes ever more fraught, ever less funny as one audience member protests, “People come here to have a good time, it’s the weekend, you wanna clear your head, and this guy gives us Yom Kippur.” Yes, and not a little Freud, too. Along the way, Grossman ( To the End of the Land, 2010, etc.) unveils scenes from Israeli history and society: through Dov, he jokes that one woman’s hairdo was designed by the same engineer who built the nuclear plant at Dimona, and it’s not long before the Holocaust is dusted off and worked into the bit.

Besides, there’s some payback in the offing for some long-ago slight: “The sweetness of the revenge I am about to be subjected to,” Avishai thinks. Avishai, the narrator, has known Dov since childhood and summer camp, and he’s amazed at the amount of hurt the comedian has stowed away, the better to make jokes out of, perhaps, but enough to keep an army of psychiatrists busy. To that end, he’s invited an old friend, Avishai Lazar, a former judge, to attend. He’s on the stage, it seems, to work out some personal issues and not a little bit of existential angst. He throws out a few insults, a few jibes, and asks them, “Why are you dumbasses laughing? That joke was about you!” But he’s no Don Rickles, not Dovelah. “Looks like my agent fucked me again,” he says, and the audience laughs appreciatively. This is a novel for our new Age of Offence – offence easily taken and endlessly performed.Dov Greenstein is on stage in Caesarea-Hello, is this microphone working?-or somewhere, at any rate, any of a hundred dusty Israeli towns, marking time before the spotlights in a tiny bar. 'What is he selling himself?' These are important questions at this moment in history, a time of trickery and lies. 'What is he selling them?' wonders the judge. Sometimes we can only apprehend these truths through story – and Grossman, like Dovaleh, has become a master of the truth-telling tale. This isn’t just a book about Israel: it’s about people and societies horribly malfunctioning.

It is a book about art, and the relationship of suffering to art. 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. As with all good parables, it requires the reader to do some work in order to understand its meaning.

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. 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 review