A Devotion That Devours

What does it feel like to want someone desperately more than they want you? To need them in a way that transcends words. What does it feel like to believe you have found that person; someone who can rescue from your miserable lonely life. Wayne Koestenbaum’s hypnotically engrossing novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, allows us a scintillating peek inside the mind of a man tortured by his love for another man; unable to think of anything else. Despite the put-downs, episodic neglect, and passive aggressive tirades he endures at the hands of his new lover, the rabbi, he feels stuck, convinced only the rabbi can save him from himself. Koestenbaum seems to understand the irrationality of destructive love as well as its allure, and we wince at his acuity at recreating it for us on the page.

My Lover, the Rabbi: A Novel  
By Wayne Koestenbaum
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; 452 pages

Those familiar with 67-year-old Wayne Koestenbaum know how talented he is. He has written about Jacqueline Kennedy and Harpo Marx, but his writing in this new novel, his first in two decades, reaches into another stratosphere. In countless interviews, Koestenbaum has spoken about how much writing excites him but simultaneously fills him with anguish, frustration, and disappointment.  We can see how he loves playing with words and syllables; creating patchwork patterns of prose that reveal as much as they titillate.

My Lover, the Rabbi is written in a dynamic first-person voice that is unrelenting in expressing to us how hopelessly in love he is with the rabbi, a man he met accidentally in a sauna when he didn’t yet know his new lover’s vocation. He knows he is better looking, taller, and better endowed than the rabbi, but admits to being smitten by every curve and crevice of the rabbi’s body. There are many enticing passages which chronicle their elaborate sexual play but his narration places even more emphasis on what he is thinking and feeling when he is with the rabbi. He is driven near mad by the rabbi’s distractedness since he is always yearning always for a comingling of both their bodies and their spirit. But the rabbi holds back focusing instead on whatever sexual fantasy he has created for them to perform. Or perhaps, the rabbi is thinking about someone else entirely. He can’t be sure.

For reasons that seem inexplicable at first glance, we find ourselves falling in love with the narrator and empathizing with his obsessive yearnings for the rabbi despite the rabbi’s coldness. We remember what it is like to fall in love with someone who doesn’t love us back and feel unable to relinquish the dream we can somehow convince them of our worthiness. There is a gentle sweetness to Koestenbaum’s prose, along with a vulnerability and desperation, that is recognizable to most of us. We too have been here before. Instead of castigating him for his blindness and willingness to be demeaned, we are drawn to his fragility and neediness.

The rabbi’s life is complicated. An ex-wife and an infant son perished years ago under mysterious circumstances that the rabbi rarely speaks about. The rabbi makes regular visits to a man in Charlottesville who seems willing to pay most of the rabbi’s bills, and there is his mysterious affinity for his trusted assistant who seems to know more about the rabbi than he does. The rabbi has been more troubled than usual lately. His lackluster sermons have caused some of his congregation to depart. And there is a mysterious center attached to the synagogue that seems to be a place where strange happenings occur. He isn’t sure what is going on, and his confusion fuels his desire to know everything he can find out about the rabbi. He sets out on a journey to learn all he can about the rabbi’s comings and goings that has treacherous consequences.

He is a man in search of unconditional love. He wants it all: loyalty, trust, respect, and the capacity for him and the rabbi to endure the negotiations and compromises all long-term relationships require. But when he tries to break new ground with the rabbi, the rabbi changes the subject. One night, the rabbi shows up naked at his apartment except for a barely closed trench coat eager to be with him. Other times, he wants them to try different things in bed that seem to have more to do with power and control than love. Even in the hours after lovemaking, the rabbi remains mute and wards off any questions that make him uncomfortable. When he pushes the rabbi for more, he is called immature and incapable of understanding the rabbi’s complexities.

Koestenbaum describes one of their early couplings shortly after they began seeing one another. Our still unnamed narrator was eager to grow closer to the rabbi convinced he was the one. But when trying to break new ground, the rabbi grew dismissive and tried to distract him.   When he persists, the rabbi castigates him.  Our narrator, under Koestenbaum’s steady hand, is forced to realize the rabbi’s heart is fractured and spread among many, some no longer with us. Koestenbaum has his narrator concede that his “lover, the rabbi, still mourning the death of his parents and brother, was usually distracted when we had sex-no proper way to phrase our congress, call it sex or habit, habituation or a grievance procedure, a catastrophe that never concluded.” Koestenbaum’s narrator shamelessly confesses that though this may be the case, he cannot stop himself from his relentless pursuit of the rabbi. In his mind, to the rabbi he had “promised a loyalty so primal and regressive it almost qualified as a throwback to a totalitarian, fascistic style of erotic attachment, a mode whereby I agreed to forfeit my autonomy should the lover request my annihilation or at least my humiliated subordination.”

As time passes, their sex takes on a bitterness he can’t quite identify. But when the rabbi leaves town, he falls into despair, unable to “tackle the flotsam of everyday life, the toothpaste and the vision repair centers and ATM’s and DMV’s and varicose veins and eroded loafers I wear to trundle down the stairs of my apartment building to retrieve the laundry from a machine spewing toxic air that smells like burnt peppers or melted cheese dripping stuck to the stove.”

Koestenbaum, in an act of sublime magic, has somehow made us feel deeply invested in a man we know little to nothing about. Who are his parents? Where are his friends? Why does he have such a lousy job repairing chairs? Why do we feel so close to him? What is it about obsession that is so beguiling? Why do we root for him to get all that he wants? Koestenbaum is too clever and perceptive a writer to try to reasonably explain any of this to us. As all great young writers are taught in writing classes, he shows it to us rather than tells us. And we take the bait.

There is one scene that stays with us long after we finish the book. He and the rabbi go to the Marriott to swim and he winces when he sees the rabbi has brought with him a book. It is just this sort of subtle put-down that makes him feel so unimportant. Later, the rabbi tells him about once having sex with a Syrian man who came to him the night after losing his mother. He never knew the man’s name but felt that somehow their coupling was sanctified since the man had sought him out for consolation. The narrator recognizes in that instant something he hadn’t noticed in the rabbi before. He sees in the rabbi a certain falseness and inauthenticity alongside a bloated sense of self-worth trying to masquerade as something better, kinder, or wiser than he really was. We rejoice at his reckoning simultaneously praying he can hold on to that in the tumultuous days that follow.

But obsessive longing is a tough nut. It is almost indestructible.