A psychosexual relationship between a rabbi and the man devoted to him goes off the rails in the first novel from Wayne Koestenbaum in nearly twenty years.
The most convincing depiction of romance I’ve read in years ... Koestenbaum sustains his urgency over the course of 450 pages because he’s an unbeatable stylist with a track record of dilating small moments of observation into wide swaths of philosophy and psychology ... Comical, unhinged ... Grapples with a subject rarely discussed in fiction with such frankness and agility.
As fierce and strange as anything you’re going to read this year ... A quite brilliant matching of style to subject ... There’s no need to grit your teeth and hope to make it to the end; for the whole of his 188 chapters, Koestenbaum writes like the best kind of angel, one who is resolutely unafraid of coming down to earth. I hope that knowingly provocative title encourages more people to risk their first encounter with this inimitable and deeply serious writer.
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 ... 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.
