My lover, the rabbi A novel

The unnamed narrator of Koestenbaum's uproarious latest (after The Cheerful Scapegoat) recounts his affair with a male rabbi. Composed of 188 vignettes, ranging from a few lines to a few pages, the narrative playfully chronicles the narrator's "up-and-down roller coaster relationship" with the "unconventional" rabbi, telling of their trysts in a New Jersey love nest, and how the rabbi lost his congregation after turning up to a bar mitzvah naked. As more secrets are revealed and the narrator's obsession with the rabbi becomes all-consuming, a caper develops that hinges on the rabbi's deceased son, Rockland; his wastrel nephew, whose "latent sanity" the narrator hopes to unlock; and his doting maid--none of whom are exactly who they seem. The narrator's search for the truth leads him to a sect known as the Anti-Pontificators, a pair of brothers who make fetish jewelry, and the cemetery from which the ghosts of the rabbi's past cling to him. As the ribald and searching quest narrative progresses, the narrator longs to know his lover completely, and eventually despairs that "I may never find my synagogue." Perverse and perplexing, this novel is a scream. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.