Wayne Koestenbaum's 'My Lover, the Rabbi': A Fierce and Strange Literary Journey
Wayne Koestenbaum has cultivated a slow-burn reputation as one of America's sharpest queer iconoclasts, yet his latest novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, defies expectations with its intense and unconventional narrative. Far from a Netflix-ready realist drama, this book plunges readers into a world of obsessive love, where the central fact—a furniture restorer's overwhelming desire for a synagogue worker—is accepted without question by all characters. The prose treats realist conventions with exalted scorn, conjuring the dangers and delights of obsession in a style that is unashamedly obsessive and wonderfully frank in its physical details. The result is as fierce and strange as any literary work you will encounter this year.
A Fierce Opening and Obsessive Structure
The fierceness of My Lover, the Rabbi begins immediately with its unique structure. All 188 chapters are short, but the first spans only four lines, using punctuation and vocabulary in tactically unexpected ways to immerse readers in a realm of carnality, confusion, and bizarrely specific detail. Like most chapters, it includes the book's title, which recurs throughout the narrative, tolling like a bell through the prose and becoming almost a mantra. This insistent formality is not mere style for style's sake; it is central to the book's uncanny life, brilliantly matching style to subject matter.
Plot Echoes of Balzac and Proust
Despite its staunchly modernist mechanics, the plot of My Lover, the Rabbi feels almost 19th-century in its storyline. Set in a recognisable America of anonymous lakeside apartments, ageing conspiracy theorists, and alternative family structures, the main plot points echo Balzac: infidelity, illegitimacy, madness, shopping, coincidences, and death. As in Balzac or Proust—another expert in obsession—it eventually emerges that nearly all characters are entangled romantically or otherwise. The furniture restorer's quest to uncover the secret of his rabbi's attractiveness is particularly Proustian, driven by an imperious and inexplicable need to find meaning beyond lovemaking in an undisclosed emotional hinterland.
The Central Conundrum and Narrative Spiral
The narrator becomes fixated on solving the mystery of his lover's three-year-old son's death, but every attempt to explicate who this child was, why he died, or even if he is truly dead reveals only further vistas of unknowability. Around this central conundrum, the plot spirals into a dizzying series of interconnected withholdings, digressions, and non sequiturs, punctuated by unashamedly explicit sex scenes that return the narrator to the primal scene of his devotion. The prose combines physical breathlessness with emotional abruptness, spiking slow-motion strangeness with a lascivious instinct for outrage—imagine Ronald Firbank filmed by John Waters or Saki channelled by Gary Indiana.
Nameless Characters and Whirlwind Invention
One of Koestenbaum's trademark fascinations is with names, reminiscent of Dickens's love for oddly memorable christenings. However, in this book, amid a multitude of idiosyncratically named characters, the key figures of the lover and his rabbi remain conspicuously nameless, referred to only as pronouns, as in the title. The whirlwind invention of the final 20 pages reveals why: the book is not truly about the maddening elusiveness of an individual body. In a fugue-like recapitulation, the narrator's obsessive desire to understand his beloved morphs into a gloriously original evocation of the unknowability of any object of desire and a vision of love's inability to triumph over death.
A Deeply Serious and Inimitable Writer
There is no need to grit your teeth to reach the end; throughout all 188 chapters, Koestenbaum writes like the best kind of angel, resolutely unafraid of coming down to earth. The knowingly provocative title of My Lover, the Rabbi may encourage more readers to risk their first encounter with this inimitable and deeply serious writer. Published by Granta at £14.99, this novel stands as a testament to Koestenbaum's unique voice and literary prowess.
