In Wayne Koestenbaum\u2019s new novel, the quest to understand the loved object\u2019s inner life takes on a Talmudic quality.<\/p>\n
My Lover, the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum. FSG Originals, 2026. 464 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org<\/a><\/p>\n Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?<\/a><\/p>\n LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2014or, better yet, love and attention.<\/p>\n It was around this time that Wayne Koestenbaum availed himself as one such teacher. An indiscreetly Jewish critic, he casts himself as a \u201cdivination-acolyte,\u201d 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<\/a>\u2014small vignettes overwhelmingly featuring his flock of shirtless male aesthetes\u2014and 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 \u201cpassionate\u201d) and began to seek him out in public, lingering in his orbit without ever saying hello.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cThis position\u2014mine\u2014of being responsible for evaluating the rabbi\u2019s worth as a moral and erotic creature encumbered me,\u201d the narrator astutely notes, \u201cand 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cAnd yet I wanted his body and his mouth and his worship, or at least his lip service, his simulation of worship.\u201d The narrator typifies an affective ambivalence that so commonly surrounds this sort of idolatrous love, at once convincing himself that he is \u201cnot drawn to religious people\u201d\u2014as he puts it, \u201cI\u2019m attracted to you because of your fixings, not your faith\u201d\u2014while simultaneously seeking to encroach on all discussions of the rabbi\u2019s deployment with sexual innuendo. When he learns that the late, great Stephen Sondheim was a member of the rabbi\u2019s synagogue, even soliciting private counseling sessions from the Talmudist, the narrator is immediately filled with intense jealousy, asking in a highly suggestive key, \u201cWere you attracted to Sondheim?\u201d It is precisely because the rabbi is a shared figure of admiration that his attractive capabilities abound.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n Lusting after religious authority is, of course, hardly new in the world of fiction. A cursory survey of The Decameron\u2014or, for that matter, any modern pornographic website\u2014will quickly transform the house of worship into a brothel of sorts. Koestenbaum\u2019s intervention into the canon of saintly love, however, involves making the rabbi, as the synopsis of the book puts it, \u201cfar from desirable.\u201d Unlike the priest, who entices as an object of sexual purity and forbidden attraction, the rabbi\u2014especially Koestenbaum\u2019s rabbi\u2014comes 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\u2014such as Pablo, the rabbi\u2019s nephew\u2019s boyfriend and \u201ca trick who became a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 who became a trusted confidant and asynchronic doppelg\u00e4nger\u201d\u2014enters into a complicated web of incestuous Jewish geography, one the narrator is tasked with unraveling.<\/p>\n In 1922, sociologist Max Weber asserted that religion is structured around charismatic authority, necessitating \u201cbearers of specific gifts of body and mind that were considered \u2018supernatural\u2019 (in the sense that not everybody could have access to them).\u201d One would imagine, therefore, that gaining access to lurid details of the rabbi\u2019s asshole\u2014that is, renderings of a particular \u201canal ailment, not life-threatening, not connected to digestion, not caused by sexual activity, not contagious\u201d\u2014might serve to undermine the rabbi\u2019s religious authority. If religion necessitates a mysterious figure at the fore, then intimate knowledge of them might lead to a certain level of disillusionment.<\/p>\n Yet, in My Lover, the Rabbi, the quest to understand the loved object\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Koestenbaum describes his own interpretation process as \u201cTalmudic\u201d: \u201cI [\u2026] have a very disorganized mind; I\u2019m 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.\u201d 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\u2019s adoration, the narrator inherits Koestenbaum\u2019s Kabbalah-esque discursiveness, traveling from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Charlottesville, Virginia, to Woodstock, New York, to Santa Cruz, California, \u201ca useless, neutered bundle of curiosities, leading to colloquy after colloquy, an echo chamber of impossible-to-conclude conversations.\u201d His quest for closeness runs parallel to a quest for the interpretative sublime, thus collapsing romantic and hermeneutic devotion.<\/p>\n It could be said that the narrator is working toward Susan Sontag\u2019s theory of an \u201cerotics of art,\u201d inverting a biblical tradition of interpretation that \u201ctakes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted\u201d in favor of \u201cplucking a set of elements [\u2026] from the whole work.\u201d In other words, the narrator\u2019s understanding of the rabbi\u2019s religious principles or stances is entirely secondary to his libidinal need for closeness, for sensorial fulfillment. On the eve of the book\u2019s 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\u2014the site of the rabbi\u2019s home\u2014in order to verify that \u201cHoboken had an outskirts.\u201d 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\u2019s narrator thus subsumes the quality of his own textural, intuitive hermeneutics, figuring interpretation as a sensuous act, as opposed to a purely epistemological one.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n It is, of course, a matter of great concern to me that my own interpretive work\u2014i.e., this very piece of writing\u2014seems more a disgraceful attempt for Koestenbaum\u2019s 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\u2019s position as an inherently humiliating, affectively overloaded one. In his own book on the topic of humiliation\u2014aptly titled Humiliation (2011)\u2014Koestenbaum notes that \u201cwriting is a process of turning [him]self inside out: a regurgitation. I extrude my vulnerable inner lining. I purge.\u201d If interpretation is an act of reckless surrender, then it offers the promise of transfiguration, of becoming someone new, someone better.<\/p>\n At the end of the My Lover, the Rabbi, it begins to appear that all the narrator\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s scraps and to carry them with me, as my own new causes and fundamentals, if it were possible for one soul\u2019s disintegration to become another soul\u2019s origination.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n In the process of writing this review, I have carried My Lover, the Rabbi from Manhattan to Queens, from LaGuardia to O\u2019Hare, 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.<\/p>\n LARB Contributor<\/p>\n Maddie Rubin is a writer from New York. She is currently a PhD student in cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n There is nothing drab about Wayne Koestenbaum.<\/p>\n