Yoram Kaniuk seems to think that to give in to a manic impulse is the same thing as having a burst of creative energy. The good things in "Rockinghorse" are a reward for patience. If the ideal fiction reader were to be imagined as the kind of person who likes to go for long walks in the rain, then "Rockinghorse" might be described as a hail storm.

Here's a sample of Yoram Kaniuk's style: … "We found a girl's exercise book. On the ground. In the yard of the Freund Hospital. Worms had gnawed the exercise book. It was old and yellow. Hidden pimples of puberty between the words. We leaf through it."

On the surface, it sounds like Louis Ferdinand Céline's "emotive subway," an intense sputtering broken by clusters of three dots; but usually, in Kaniuk's case, there is no ostensible reason for it. Céline often...