MY LOVER, THE RABBI

An exacting, if challenging, study of obsession.

Koestenbaum offers not so much a novel as a sustained act of literary exposure: erotic, intellectual, punishing, and deliberately unresolved. From its first sentence, swollen with clauses, Koestenbaum, best known as a poet and critic, makes work for the reader, daring us to follow without blinking. The unnamed narrator’s fixation on the rabbi unfolds in short, numbered bursts that read like anecdotes, prayers, or performance cues. Many begin with the incantatory phrase “my lover, the rabbi,” and progressively lengthen as the novel develops. The comedy is unmistakably high camp, featuring Grace Kelly roses, Streisand cameos, and a topless Stephen Sondheim, but it is anchored in an insistently fleshy, sometimes repellent corporeality. Koestenbaum strips sex of glamor and replaces it with sweat, leakage, humiliation, and phallic obsession rendered anti-erotic through excess. Sentences sometimes balloon to punitive lengths, daring the reader to keep pace. The novel inhabits an insistently queer social universe, largely emptied of heteronormative family structures, where intimacy and authority are rerouted through erotic and spiritual fixation. Grief runs beneath the gleaming prose. The deaths that haunt the rabbi are not simply vessels for insight; they thicken the atmosphere. This refusal of catharsis feels intentional. Narrative, erotic, and moral satisfaction are systematically denied. The lingering question is not whether the book is accomplished (it is), but whether endurance is its own reward. Koestenbaum stages a performance that refuses to bow; whether that refusal is bracing or merely wearing will divide readers.

A brilliant, demanding novel-as-performance that resists pat simplification.