My Lover, The Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum
Cult gay poet and writer Wayne Koestenbaum finally gets a UK release with his latest book, My Lover, The Rabbi
It’s taken 40 years for Wayne Koestenbaum to receive a major UK publication. The poet, artist and writer has always maintained a cult status in America, penning strange and eccentric works from the peripheries of the US publishing scene. Impossible to pin down and unwilling to remain in any one medium or genre, Koestenbaum has never translated in the way that other niche gay novelists, like Dennis Cooper or Gary Indiana, have.
So thank goodness a UK publisher has finally caved; Granta have released Koestenbaum’s newest novel, My Lover, The Rabbi, a slutty and bizarre doorstopper that, like much of the author’s work, defies classification. Here, our narrator is sleeping with a rabbi and, for large chunks of the novel, that’s all they do; within 20 pages, we learn about every graphic inch of the rabbi’s body. As our narrator ingratiates himself more and more into the rabbi’s personal life, the results prove as upsetting as they are campy. Broken up into odd little page-long chapters, it is a frequently discomforting and outrageous novel, and Koestenbaum’s distended prose – verbose, poetic and theatrical – simultaneously delights and perplexes.
Here, Koestenbaum has taken the erotic novel and shorn it of eroticism, reducing to its sweaty and smelly base components. The author is so flamboyantly set on turning you off that he circles back round to achieving the opposite effect. For this reason, My Lover, The Rabbi can be an alienating and difficult read – this is, naturally, not a wise choice for book club – but bear with it and its gleeful excesses prove highly rewarding.
