The back cov­er of Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rab­bi describes the nov­el as ​“sui gener­is,” of its own kind, and indeed that is true — though per­haps it’s more to the point to say that this book feels like the sole extant text from anoth­er, gay­er, uncan­nier planet.

The nov­el stars an unnamed nar­ra­tor and his lover, a rab­bi with a some­what bul­ly­ing, holi­er-than-thou per­son­al­i­ty and a trag­ic past. At the begin­ning of the book, which takes place most­ly in the rabbi’s Char­lottesville and the narrator’s Hobo­ken, we learn that the rabbi’s par­ents died sud­den­ly, as did his broth­er; his wife, Car­la; and his and Carla’s three-year-old son, Rock­land. The rab­bi and his hus­band, Atlas, have tak­en the rabbi’s young-adult nephew, Dito, into their cus­tody. Com­plet­ing the entan­gled cast are Dito’s lover, Pablo, a stu­dent of ​“social assem­blage” who was once the rabbi’s one-night-stand; Doc Zim­mer­man, a cryp­tic elder pre­sid­ing over the Anti-Pon­tif­i­ca­tors, a group of rad­i­cals strange­ly con­nect­ed to the rabbi’s syn­a­gogue; and Mon­i­ca Prague, a severe and mys­te­ri­ous devo­tee of the rab­bi who keeps his affairs in order, includ­ing look­ing after trou­bled Dito.

For much of the book, the narrator’s focus lies square­ly on his attach­ment, erot­ic and oth­er­wise, to the rab­bi. He claims to have ​“no world” beyond his lover, despite the tumul­tuous­ness of their rela­tion­ship. Many ear­ly scenes are sex scenes, episodes that some­times arouse and exalt the nar­ra­tor and oth­er times leave him feel­ing dis­gust­ed and belittled:

“Dead boy,” my lover called me, at one of our first encoun­ters, in Char­lottesville, at a lit­tle-known, near­ly invis­i­ble sauna, the rab­bi and I seat­ed side by side on the damp slab of wood; his cock seemed to me … beseech­ing and intol­er­ant — its intol­er­ance man­i­fest­ing in the rabbi’s com­pul­sion to cut me down to size … as if this were a new, sought-after endear­ment I’d strug­gled my whole life to earn. 

Over time, how­ev­er, the object of the narrator’s obses­sion shifts: he, a man of great neu­ro­sis, devo­tion, and mag­i­cal think­ing, under­takes a quest to unpack the ​“grief machine,” the ​“Bluebeard’s‑castle silence” sur­round­ing Car­la and Rockland’s deaths. The result is a strange, sub­lime, almost Sty­gian jour­ney toward some­thing like knowledge. 

Just as fas­ci­nat­ing as the novel’s plot and char­ac­ters are Koestenbaum’s prose style and craft choic­es. While his sen­tences are long and wind­ing, full of gar­gan­tu­an phras­es like ​“roseate laten­cy” and ​“qua­si-slum­brous­ness,” his chap­ters tend to be lit­tle more than a page long — a com­bi­na­tion that reads as a kind of pro­tract­ed arousal cut short by cli­max. Even rhyth­mi­cal­ly, chap­ters often end in a sat­is­fy­ing crescen­do, as in: “… I was struck by … a surge of long­ing for the rab­bi to request some­thing of me, to make a direct offer, to seize my legs and to draw him­self upright and clasp my body as an equal, the two of us stand­ing, hairy and naked, in the tub, like revenants, sur­vivors of some ear­li­er moment in the his­to­ry of our rap­port and our mutu­al resent­ment.” All through­out the book, Koesten­baum demon­strates his sen­si­tiv­i­ty as a nov­el­ist, one with a poet’s ear and a co(s)mically large vocabulary.

My Lover, the Rab­bi is a whirling, Alice in Won­der­land–esque por­trait of a man falling deep­er and deep­er down a rab­bit hole just south of desire. Riotous and max­i­mal­ist, it fur­ther widens the queer archive, and injects new life — and death — into the vaunt­ed genre of want.