In Wayne Koestenbaum’s new novel, the quest to understand the loved object’s inner life takes on a Talmudic quality.
My Lover, the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum. FSG Originals, 2026. 464 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org
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I WAS FRESHLY out of undergrad and looking for a charismatic figure to replace my professors. I tried reading Tony Robbins, and when that didn’t work out, I considered courting a 40-year-old man. My desire for tutelage was bordering on the messianic: a search for an academic to whom I could surrender myself, in whom I might find literary salvation—or, better yet, love and attention.
It was around this time that Wayne Koestenbaum availed himself as one such teacher. An indiscreetly Jewish critic, he casts himself as a “divination-acolyte,” approaching figures like Maria Callas, Andy Warhol, and Nicole Kidman with a reverence both libidinal and pious. Many nights, I studied his short films on Instagram—small vignettes overwhelmingly featuring his flock of shirtless male aesthetes—and wondered when a girl like me would be worthy of cinemascopic study. I wrote an application to work with him at the CUNY Graduate Center (an application one professor called “passionate”) and began to seek him out in public, lingering in his orbit without ever saying hello.
It was in this pursuit that I followed Koestenbaum to a talk he was giving with performer Morgan Bassichis in mid-March, occasioned by the publication of his first work of fiction in nearly two decades. Unbeknownst to me, just as I was nursing my own evangelical attachment to Koestenbaum, he was also hard at work on his own novel of eroto-Judaic desire, My Lover, the Rabbi. Unlike my own fixation on Koestenbaum (restrained, ashamed), however, the unnamed protagonist of My Lover, the Rabbi indulges fully in a semi-real, semi-speculative romance with his lover, the rabbi. Ravaged by neurotic bouts of desire, the narrator occupies an uncomfortable status as both disciple and intermittent sexual liaison, never quite picking a lane. “This position—mine—of being responsible for evaluating the rabbi’s worth as a moral and erotic creature encumbered me,” the narrator astutely notes, “and I often wished I could approach my lover without having to decide whether he was a fatally culpable man or a sympathetic figure, invested with the power to charm his listeners and to excite passionate advances from anyone, of any gender, in his riddling vicinity.”
Koestenbaum takes advantage of the linguistic slippages between filial devotion and romantic devotion, finding pleasure in the salvific language that so often surfaces during the sexual act. The narrator writes, for instance: “And yet I wanted his body and his mouth and his worship, or at least his lip service, his simulation of worship.” The narrator typifies an affective ambivalence that so commonly surrounds this sort of idolatrous love, at once convincing himself that he is “not drawn to religious people”—as he puts it, “I’m attracted to you because of your fixings, not your faith”—while simultaneously seeking to encroach on all discussions of the rabbi’s deployment with sexual innuendo. When he learns that the late, great Stephen Sondheim was a member of the rabbi’s synagogue, even soliciting private counseling sessions from the Talmudist, the narrator is immediately filled with intense jealousy, asking in a highly suggestive key, “Were you attracted to Sondheim?” It is precisely because the rabbi is a shared figure of admiration that his attractive capabilities abound.
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Lusting after religious authority is, of course, hardly new in the world of fiction. A cursory survey of The Decameron—or, for that matter, any modern pornographic website—will quickly transform the house of worship into a brothel of sorts. Koestenbaum’s intervention into the canon of saintly love, however, involves making the rabbi, as the synopsis of the book puts it, “far from desirable.” Unlike the priest, who entices as an object of sexual purity and forbidden attraction, the rabbi—especially Koestenbaum’s rabbi—comes overloaded with a past of sexual dalliances, traumas, and dead bodies (his first wife, Carla, and his only son, Rockland, have both died under mysterious circumstances). Each character introduced in the book—such as Pablo, the rabbi’s nephew’s boyfriend and “a trick who became a protégé who became a trusted confidant and asynchronic doppelgänger”—enters into a complicated web of incestuous Jewish geography, one the narrator is tasked with unraveling.
In 1922, sociologist Max Weber asserted that religion is structured around charismatic authority, necessitating “bearers of specific gifts of body and mind that were considered ‘supernatural’ (in the sense that not everybody could have access to them).” One would imagine, therefore, that gaining access to lurid details of the rabbi’s asshole—that is, renderings of a particular “anal ailment, not life-threatening, not connected to digestion, not caused by sexual activity, not contagious”—might serve to undermine the rabbi’s religious authority. If religion necessitates a mysterious figure at the fore, then intimate knowledge of them might lead to a certain level of disillusionment.
Yet, in My Lover, the Rabbi, the quest to understand the loved object’s inner life (and, as it were, inner organs) takes on a Talmudic quality in and of itself. The anal gives way to the annal: that is, the rabbi’s sexual sojourns become an archive through which the narrator can inspect, pontificate, interpret, conjecture, and discourse, echoing the very foundations of Jewish thought itself. In a 2018 interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Koestenbaum describes his own interpretation process as “Talmudic”: “I […] have a very disorganized mind; I’m a syncopater and an interrupter. I find myself quickly derailed by association. Letting myself be derailed and finding ways to be productively derailed has been my writing strategy for a long time.” Though My Lover, the Rabbi is a work of fiction, its main character acts as a paranoid critic of sorts. In his quest for the rabbi’s adoration, the narrator inherits Koestenbaum’s Kabbalah-esque discursiveness, traveling from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Charlottesville, Virginia, to Woodstock, New York, to Santa Cruz, California, “a useless, neutered bundle of curiosities, leading to colloquy after colloquy, an echo chamber of impossible-to-conclude conversations.” His quest for closeness runs parallel to a quest for the interpretative sublime, thus collapsing romantic and hermeneutic devotion.
It could be said that the narrator is working toward Susan Sontag’s theory of an “erotics of art,” inverting a biblical tradition of interpretation that “takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted” in favor of “plucking a set of elements […] from the whole work.” In other words, the narrator’s understanding of the rabbi’s religious principles or stances is entirely secondary to his libidinal need for closeness, for sensorial fulfillment. On the eve of the book’s publication, Koestenbaum confessed to an audience at McNally Jackson Books that the novel contained startlingly little factual research. He did not, for instance, visit New Jersey—the site of the rabbi’s home—in order to verify that “Hoboken had an outskirts.” Nor, for that matter, did he do any substantial research into rabbis, besides those superficial observations gained from his own upbringing in Reform Judaism. Koestenbaum’s narrator thus subsumes the quality of his own textural, intuitive hermeneutics, figuring interpretation as a sensuous act, as opposed to a purely epistemological one.
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It is, of course, a matter of great concern to me that my own interpretive work—i.e., this very piece of writing—seems more a disgraceful attempt for Koestenbaum’s attention than, say, a rigorous piece of scholarly research (I was not, after all, accepted into the CUNY Graduate Center). Yet it is Koestenbaum himself who embraces the interpreter’s position as an inherently humiliating, affectively overloaded one. In his own book on the topic of humiliation—aptly titled Humiliation (2011)—Koestenbaum notes that “writing is a process of turning [him]self inside out: a regurgitation. I extrude my vulnerable inner lining. I purge.” If interpretation is an act of reckless surrender, then it offers the promise of transfiguration, of becoming someone new, someone better.
At the end of the My Lover, the Rabbi, it begins to appear that all the narrator’s investigative work has been destructive to both himself and his love object: the rabbi has lost his sovereign status in the congregation, and the narrator has inadvertently killed him in a mysterious autoerotic asphyxiation incident. Yet rather than relent in his dogged search for the sexual sublime, the narrator instead transforms himself into the rabbi incarnate:
Those tatters mantled him, however invisibly, and I, as witness, and as inadvertent cause of his diminishment, was obliged to see and to save his forfeited regality’s scraps and to carry them with me, as my own new causes and fundamentals, if it were possible for one soul’s disintegration to become another soul’s origination.
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In the process of writing this review, I have carried My Lover, the Rabbi from Manhattan to Queens, from LaGuardia to O’Hare, from McNally Jackson to the underside of the pillow on which I rest my very head. Maybe Wayne Koestenbaum will never read this. Maybe he will never look me in the eye. Maybe he will disapprove of my prose, my analysis, and my general vibe as a human being. Yet I have won, for he has already imparted to me a gift: the spirit of the interpreter-acolyte.
LARB Contributor
Maddie Rubin is a writer from New York. She is currently a PhD student in cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago.
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