Review: “My Lover, the Rabbi”, by Wayne Koestenbaum
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026), pp. 464. ISBN: 9780374620189

Many contemporary novels are a sustained single image—they are premise without advancement, privileging concentration over momentum. Rather than driving forward through plot, they deepen and return. Meanwhile, as the art of blurbing has been collectively honed, the back-cover comes to name the book’s core concern so accurately that the novel can seem to be thoughtfully circling its own backmatter.

My Lover, the Rabbi darts in and out of this description. It has a coiled intensity that is difficult to describe. It feels like very little happens in the first half, and then the book picks up pace—although it may also simply be spinning its wheels. What matters here is not narrative progress nor surprise but the quality of attention the book is able to sustain: a kind of frantic stillness. It is a novel you will want to start all over again once you have finished it. If you do, it will all look new. Like walking around a perplexing, angular sculpture, you need to take it all in a few times from many different standpoints. Here meaning accrues through repetition and levels of proximity; each shift in position reveals a different intensity to the same form.

If the book is static, it is static in the sense that a stack of cards is static. Precariously balanced and finely done, this stillness is an incredible achievement. It is a book about obsessional desire, and how desire has an indirection to it. In this, Koestenbaum is writing inside Roland Barthes, whom Koestenbaum has elsewhere described as a champion of nuance.^1A Lover’s Discourse explores love as a language, a system of repeating “figures” through which the lover speaks and thinks. Barthes’ book and Koestenbaum’s novel are about love’s looping, repetitive temporality.

Koestenbaum’s novel is narrated by an antique furniture repairman who is in a relationship with a rabbi. They are both unnamed. The narrator is as much detective as lover, because what he wants above all is to understand the rabbi’s past. He has a dogged loquaciousness that is also gentle – he circles, traces and expounds. We are compelled to orbit around the rabbi, and after some time others swim into view—the rabbi’s dead son Rockwell, Carla his dead wife, Dito the rabbi’s nephew, Atlas Fitzgerald, Monica Prague, Tamara Atkins, Pablo Rowlands, Doc Zimmerman, Ari Aramillo, etc. We learn more and more about the rabbi’s past, each of the people around the rabbi, a group called the “Anti-Pontificators”, and the rabbi’s deceased family. To read this book is to become, like the rabbi’s lover, “a housefly circling a plate of overripe blueberries.”²The novel produces that same sticky, perfumed suspension—pleasurable, nauseating, impossible to abandon. But isn’t that being a lover? Our narrator asks: “Did I love the circuitousness more than I craved the climax?”³ By the time we reach this question, we know with certainty that we are being toyed with. Our narrator knows full well that the answer is absolutely 100% yes.

Words love each other. They defer to each other and we call this paraphrase. Our narrator is not only a detective and lover, but a court historian. And as one translator of The Tale of Genji says: “Court language anywhere is discrete and indirect. Courtiers express themselves guardedly and rarely call a spade a spade.”4 In this book people do not stand up, they “attain verticality”.5 While we might think of a courtier as someone who seeks personal advancement in a royal orbit, the word has a wider remit – it also describes the way people speak at executive boards, the way they act around people they perceive as powerful. A courtier is a practitioner of adjacency, favoring indirectness, veiled references, polite evasions, coded hints. They say things without saying them. Sam Ladkin’s Perfectly Disgraceful looks at O’Hara and the New York School through the lens of mannerism but also posits O’Hara as a “late-modernist courtier”.6 This courtliness appears especially in Ladkin’s apt application of sprezzatura to O’Hara’s poetry—sprezzatura being the cultivated nonchalance celebrated in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Courtliness suits Koestenbaum, a devotee of O’Hara, because he is a consummate stylist who writes with full awareness of his own virtuosity. And even if it is not this book’s subject, he knows well that courtliness is not just a language but an economy—the rabbi’s husband Atlas is bankrolling almost every character we meet.7

Entire scenes are composed in a conditional mood or in questions, as if the narrator cannot commit to recounting anything as fact. This book does not favor forward propulsion but levitation, hovering between figure and ground. Here, things make noises and resonate but never touch, like a haunting theremin. Being without touch is lonesome. My Lover, the Rabbi, like Barthes A Lover’s Discourse, is lonely because the lover’s speech is fundamentally monologue. I think of this qualification from our narrator after some reported speech by the rabbi:

“I’m paraphrasing his words, because I want this account, piecemeal yet protracted, to be in one voice only, absolutely consistent, no intrusion of the rabbi’s cumbersome reality into my carnal and cerebral festivity.”8

Is reality irrelevant to this cerebral festivity? The book builds, as it circles, a series of inconsequential details. We must engage in the constant work of scrying signs. For example, what does it mean that two sets of characters strike similar poses in a bath?9 Late in the novel, everyone the repairman meets gives long speeches as if enrolled in a collective performance of “detailed” explanation, and our narrator gobbles them up hungrily.10 In this centrifugal truth-making, the rabbi’s past proliferates rather than clarifies. Why does one character tell us that in fact the rabbi’s son Rockwell is not dead at all?11 This revelation, if it is one, is treated with the narrative equivalent of a shrug. It is yet another detail perversely limning Barthes’ reality-effect. Serving no function in advancing a story, these assertions seem all the more real and true.

Near the end, the house of cards almost falls over in a series of fake-outs. With very few pages to go we are given significant events only to be told they were all a dream, except no, the bit that claimed it was all a dream was itself the dream! It is a gamble. But the heft of the book’s inscrutable and shifting object of desire is never lost, not even in the execution of such an audacious stunt. Here is the beautiful closing crescendo:

“The absence of the rabbi was the desiccation of my throat, the scissoring away of my sight, the corset of pain encircling my back, the rusty destitution of my lips, the wheezing of my lungs, the aching in my testicles. […] He remained here only as the sensation of constriction and suffocation in my lungs, the sensation in my abdomen that it had been hammered shut, the sensation in my heart—if the heart has sensations—that it had been soldered into a spat-upon steel square, a heavy inhuman cube right here in your hand.”12

This book is a longing so compacted that it condenses into a steel cube that the reader is asked not to understand but to hold.

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^1 Sam Ladkin, Frank O’Hara’s New York School and Mid-Century Mannerism: Perfectly Disgraceful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), p. 1
² Koestenbaum, My Lover, the Rabbi, pp. 326-7, p. 364.
³ Koestenbaum, My Lover, the Rabbi, p. 74.
^4 Koestenbaum, My Lover, the Rabbi, p. 248.
^5 Koestenbaum, My Lover, the Rabbi, pp. 308-9.
^6 Koestenbaum, My Lover, the Rabbi, p. 355.
^7 Koestenbaum, My Lover, the Rabbi, pp. 451-2.