Wayne Koestenbaum has built himself a slow-burn reputation as one of America’s sharpest queer iconoclasts, but the title of his latest novel suggests Netflix-ready realism. Will My Lover, the Rabbi be a sober yet uplifting account of the conflict between religious orthodoxy and forbidden desire? Not a bit of it. The book’s central and anchoring fact – the overwhelming desire of a man who works as an antique furniture restorer for a man who works in a synagogue – is accepted as a given by every single character. The writing, meanwhile, treats all realist convention with a kind of exalted scorn, conjuring the dangers and delights of obsession in prose that is itself unashamedly obsessive – and wonderfully frank when it gets down to the physical details. The result is as fierce and strange as anything you’re going to read this year.
The fierceness begins immediately. All the book’s 188 chapters are short, but the first one comes in at only four lines. Putting both punctuation and vocabulary to tactically unexpected use, it plunges the reader straight into a world of carnality, confusion and bizarrely specific detail. Like all but a handful of the chapters, it also includes the title of the book itself. And as the book proceeds, this reiteration of the title begins to toll like a bell through the architecture of its prose, becoming almost a mantra. Far from being style-for-style’s sake, this insistent and anxious formality is at the heart of the book’s uncanny life; a quite brilliant matching of style to subject.
As a plot begins to emerge, the book seems – bizarrely, given its otherwise staunchly modernist mechanics – to be almost 19th century in its storyline. Though set in a recognisable America of anonymous lakeside apartments, ageing conspiracy theorists and alternative family structures, the main plot points could be straight out of Balzac: infidelity, illegitimacy, madness, shopping, coincidences and death. As in Balzac – or Proust, for that matter, another expert in the mechanics of obsession – it eventually turns out that almost all the characters have either slept with each other or are otherwise entangled.
Even more Proustian is the furniture restorer’s need to discover the secret of his rabbi’s attractiveness, something he experiences as both imperious and inexplicable. Like Proust’s Swann, he persuades himself that the key to his love object’s allure must lie not so much in their lovemaking as in some undisclosed emotional hinterland. Eventually, the narrator decides the mystery he has to solve is that of the death of his lover’s three-year-old son. Thereafter, every attempt to explicate who this child was, why he died and whether he is in fact even dead reveals only further vistas of unknowability.
Around this central conundrum, the plot spirals into a dizzying series of interconnected withholdings, digressions and non sequiturs, punctuated at regular intervals by a series of unashamedly filthy sex scenes, all of which serve only to return our narrator to the primal scene of his devotion. Meanwhile, the furniture restorer’s sentences continue to combine physical breathlessness with emotional abruptness, spiking the slow-motion strangeness of their locations and encounters with an almost lascivious instinct for outrage. Imagine Ronald Firbank, but filmed by John Waters; Saki, but channelled by Gary Indiana.
One of Koestenbaum’s trademark fascinations has always been with people’s names; like Dickens, he loves an oddly memorable christening. However, in this book, amid a multitude of idiosyncratically named characters, the key figures of the lover and his rabbi remain conspicuously nameless; just as in the title, they are only ever pronouns.
The whirlwind invention of the last 20 pages reveals why. As it turns out, the book isn’t really about the maddening elusiveness of an individual body; in a final, fugue-like recapitulation, the narrator’s obsessive desire to understand or unravel his beloved morphs into a gloriously original evocation of the unknowability of any object of desire, and – beyond that – a vision of what it might feel like to admit to the inability of love to triumph over death.
But 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.
• My Lover, the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
