Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi (FSG Originals, $19) is a work of erotic fiction that arrived, by the author’s account, as an ambush. An unnamed narrator pursues an unnamed rabbi in sentences that begin as an incantation and gradually become a story—of sorts. Koestenbaum, an artist, poet, essayist, and critic, recently talked with Bookforum about surrender, the endlessness of the erotic archive, and why his ideal readers share an appetite for the incongruous and the refractory.
JENNIFER KRASINSKI: How long had the rabbi—as figure, as character—been looming in your psyche before you began to write?
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM: I had no plan to write this book whatsoever. I did not conceive of it until two days before I started, on August 10, 2024. The novel emerged suddenly—it ambushed me, and I accepted, I surrendered.
KRASINSKI: Surrendered how? And to what, precisely?
KOESTENBAUM: To the embrace of the rabbi as image system and dominating presence.
KRASINSKI: Were there reasons that he appeared on that particular day?
KOESTENBAUM: Secret catalysts, yes, but more importantly, his appearance had the prelude of decades of research. Not rabbi-specific research, but rather homoerotic research of various kinds, experiential as well as textual and visual. And so I had available a large internal museum of images and figures of speech and cultural stereotypes. I’ve also had many years of practice trying to put into words embarrassing and unspeakable materials.
KRASINSKI: I’d never think of a rabbi as being a site of the embarrassing and the unspeakable! Well, the unspeakable perhaps, but the embarrassing, no.
KOESTENBAUM: Rabbis in general, no. My rabbi is strangely, only coincidentally, a rabbi, even though I give him some career specifics so that he performs “rabbi” ably. If you believe the book, he is actually a rabbi, but his rabbi vocation floats free of him and seems like a disposable cloak.
KRASINSKI: One of the many things I love about this book is how your characters are like figments. They retain a certain blur. I have a half-thought question for you about a character’s surface value versus its role as psychological and emotional repository, but I won’t be able to stick the landing right now! But I do want to ask about the naming of characters, which as a writer I always find such a drag—so goofy and limiting somehow. Your rabbi is unnamed, referred to by the narrator throughout as “my rabbi,” repeated in the beginning like an incantation. Your narrator also has no name. How did that permit them to function on the page like you wanted them to?
KOESTENBAUM: Namelessness allowed the rabbi to be a container and encyclopedia and storehouse for disparate materials. I could project any traits onto the rabbi’s figmental character. He could be anyone. Each day, as I sat down to write, I could have in mind a different person, and he would still qualify as the rabbi, much like the “you” in Emily Dickinson’s poetry or the “you” in anybody’s lyric or love poem. To the extent that the “you” is unspecified, it is the master. And so I could write an erotic love letter to the void and call the void a rabbi because the void is a holy place—it’s the “No One” (the emptiness) that Paul Celan invoked as a dead limit to our hopes of being received and answered. We need a sacred practitioner to be the supervisor of the void. And the narrator was unnamed partly because, well, of course, the narrator is me. I always use the first person when I write, and I have a poetic or essayistic voice that is recognizably mine, so I could continue with that voice in fiction, and gradually, as the novel progresses, the voice could grow further and further away from my own. But after characters get names—Dito, Monica Prague, Pablo Rowlands—they’re delimited and somewhat comic. Monica Prague for me remained the figure of most melancholy numinousness, even though she has a name. Maybe it was because her last name is a haunted city that she could be more than just one Monica.
KRASINSKI: What moved you to write all this as a novel rather than some other form?
KOESTENBAUM: I had finished a book of poems, The Group Tickling Experiment, which will be published by Nightboat Books in 2028, and so I had a little interval of space to contemplate something new. I had just reread Maurice Blanchot’s When the Time Comes, translated by Lydia Davis. Inspired by Blanchot, I wanted to write something short, a text populated only by the longing for the other to manifest. I had also just read a book or two by Constance Debré. And I wanted, motivated by her work, to write a short book of absolute truth with nothing figurative about it but that had a temperature of heat and cold at the same time. I didn’t know that it would be fiction because fiction isn’t my customary genre, but I wrote the first sentences in the book, and suddenly I wanted to write a book of similar sentences. I thought of the project at that point not quite as a novel but as an incantation, a sequence of related sentences. Each would begin, “my lover, the rabbi”—and then we’d move to the next page. “My lover, the rabbi”—next page. So it would be like Joe Brainard’s I Remember. There’s a word for that kind of litany: “anaphora.”
KRASINSKI: In the book’s early pages, when each section is a single sentence, you can feel the genesis of both “I” and the rabbi, watch them materialize . . .
KOESTENBAUM: Those chapters are a diary of the book’s gestation, quite literally. So the novel is beginning, but also you as a careful and sympathetic reader are witnessing the germination in me of the wish to write, the wish for this outpouring to be a novel. It’s surprising to me now to see how quickly, in those early sections, characters and plot particulars began to appear that seemed destined to emerge, like premonitory catalysts, at the beginning. Like, I think already by page five, we’ve heard about the death of Rockland, the rabbi’s son, and the death of the rabbi’s first wife. I had no intention when those events were conjured on page five that they would become the plot of the book.
KRASINSKI: If you started this book writing very much in your voice, did you feel it shift when it became clear that this was a work of fiction, when “I” became someone or something else?
KOESTENBAUM: I think the shift happened because I started to have narrative duties. There were scenes and speculations that led to further scenes and speculations, and I had to unspool those scenes and speculations, which required a degree of dutifulness and thoroughness in operating the novelistic machinery, rather than a more extravagant lyric flight with a lot of metaphors and references or allusions. I had to perform more diurnal pedestrian tasks of narrative elaboration, which required a different style. My intention was that I would not give up an air of giddy grandiloquence. I wouldn’t give up the elevated tone, but I would move it out of the baroque mode of the early chapters and into a more Jamesian mode of circumlocution, ambiguity, unknowability. Self-deception.
KRASINSKI: It’s funny how your narrator so easily falls into K-holes of his own inquisitiveness, failing to recognize the answers, but also knowing that answers aren’t actually the point.
KOESTENBAUM: I don’t know if you have this feeling about your own childhood and genealogy, Jennifer, but there’s a fiction circulating out there in the culture that if we just do enough genealogical research and ask living relatives for stories about the past, then we’re going to know exactly who we are. And you can ask away and you can do assiduous research and grave-visitation and you’re still not going to know beans about your infancy or your origins. Unknowability is a fact of my life and maybe a fact of other people’s lives. And the narrator’s condition is having all these resources, these epistemological resources, that are useless because his origin—or the origin of this mystery—is unknowable. Not because the facts are unknowable, but because why the facts matter is unknowable.
KRASINSKI: My Lover, the Rabbi is the first book I’ve read in a very long time that made me weep at the end. Sure, it was the usual readerly grief over a sad ending and having to let go of a book and its world. I would also say that I experienced a kind of rupture, having become somewhat enmeshed with “I” and the rabbi, which their “container-ness” invites a reader to do. And because erotics are very much at the center of this book, I wonder what, for you as an author, gives a character, a form, their eros?
KOESTENBAUM: The thing I like best about sexuality and about my sexuality and about my sexual imagination is that it gives the illusion of endlessness. For me as a delver and desirer, erotics create the illusion of an infinite vanishing point. When I feel a certain confidence or authority as a writer is when I’m convinced of that never-ending-ness of the erotic coffers as well as the infinite replenishability of that museum. When I set out to write a book founded on desire, I proceeded like a researcher, examining the lost dossiers of my own history of desire. It felt really lovely and rare to have a project where the scope of that investigation seemed to me endless. I could go on as far as I wanted into the Museum of the Rabbi and continue to make discoveries of what my desire looked like and how my desire acted. So my desire isn’t the same as the narrator’s, but the narrator is my investigative vehicle, my divining rod, leading me to hidden springs.
KRASINSKI: That illusion of endlessness doesn’t have anything to do with some idea of immortality, does it?
KOESTENBAUM: No, it has to do with our foretold and unconsciously embedded archetypes. I’m thinking of Jean Genet’s essay “What Remains of a Rembrandt After It Is Torn into Little Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet.” Genet has an insight when he’s on a train and he sees a man—it’s a scene of desire, of aleatory cruising. He sees this man, and he realizes that this stranger could be everyone. Genet seems to assert that when desire is at its wiliest and most perversely principled, it’s in the service of investigations into human identity and human sameness. So the archive of the rabbi and the endlessness of the rabbi don’t imply a wish for immortality, but a confidence that there’s going to be four billion versions of the rabbi if you keep looking, and therefore you will never run out of hungered-for objects.
KRASINSKI: One of the ideas you casually let loose in the book is that of the “sexual citizen.” What does it mean to you to be a sexual citizen in this world?
KOESTENBAUM: To be pretentious about it, I think maybe sometimes I have been called a queer theorist or have called myself a queer theorist. I’m not sure what that term means anymore. But there have been a lot of passionate people in the past fifty and more years thinking about desire and society and deviance and dissidence. In this novel, I enjoyed engaging in a little soft-core political thinking about how people behave together and create bonds and communities, however farcical these arrangements are, or however slightly utopian and far-fetched they are. Indirectly I’m always inspired by what Samuel R. Delany chronicles in his book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, or some of those early works of both feminism and queer theory like Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex or Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism. There’s a whole body of thinking about sexual possibility that I devoutly poached upon or let serve as my book’s unseen theoretical foundation.
KRASINSKI: I enjoy thinking that a writer must be the most promiscuous of all sexual citizens.
KOESTENBAUM: The only way I knew how to make this mental adventure into a book was to continue desiring the rabbi. And so that was the daily project, to work up desire for the rabbi and to keep the desire going. And that is obsessive but also obedience to a work ethic. A certain process of anatomizing desire requires discipline, sticking to the metamorphic topic. The rabbi had to become many people as the book progressed. And so I would continue to choose new people for the rabbi to resemble. Part of my note-taking, before drafting each new chapter, would be to decide which traits the rabbi should possess, features borrowed from all eras of my life, from people I’ve known and people I’ve seen only in passing.
KRASINSKI: But that’s the truth of desire, isn’t it? It actually isn’t . . .
KOESTENBAUM: . . . it’s not always the same person.
KRASINSKI: No! Desire has to atomize. We may choose the object on which it can rest for a while, or for a long time, but we as sexual citizens still have to honor its oxygen-like composition. Given all this, I admit that I was surprised you gave the story a tragic ending. Did that feel inevitable at some point while you were writing?
KOESTENBAUM: It’s interesting to hear you say, and you’re of course right, that I chose to give it a tragic ending—of course I did, because I wrote it. And yet it’s not because I’m leaning on some romance of “the characters demand it.” But I understood the ending’s inevitability, because of the rabbi’s tendency to wander away from proximity to the narrator. The rabbi is often migratory and is certainly not a daily, reliable presence, and so the rabbi’s tendency to vanish was built into his desirability from the beginning. And so I think I needed to follow through on the rabbi as a vanishing entity.
KRASINSKI: As the story’s literal vanishing point.
KOESTENBAUM: I wish I knew what he looked like, I wish I knew more facts about these characters. It would be a stronger card to play if I could say to you I had a very clear idea of what their names were and what they looked like and where they lived, but I chose tactically to shroud them in mystery. Instead of clarity, I don’t have a clue. Or I have too many clues. I would love to sell the film rights, which sadly has not happened and may never happen, because I don’t know if it’s a filmable book. Marguerite Duras could have filmed it! But I really would love Sacha Baron Cohen to play either the narrator or the rabbi.
KRASINSKI: Or both! Or is that too pervy?
KOESTENBAUM: He’s pretty good at disguise. I think if Jason Gould had the acting chops—Jason Gould as the narrator and Sacha Baron Cohen as the rabbi would really do it.
KRASINSKI: Jason’s sure got genealogy on his side . . .
KOESTENBAUM: Just get the book to Sacha!
KRASINSKI: Duly noted, and now pivoting us to the question of influence, because you are also one of our great readers.
KOESTENBAUM: The fiction writers that I’ve always worshipped are Robert Walser, Jane Bowles, and Laura Riding—somewhat lunatic-fringe fiction writers where everything is plausible but also stretched thin and pushed to the boundaries of sense.
KRASINSKI: And that appealed because . . .
KOESTENBAUM: Because I love fairy tales. I love “once upon a time.” Once upon a time, there was a house, and in the house lived . . .
KRASINSKI: A witch.
KOESTENBAUM: One day the witch got tired of being a witch and so she packed a bag and wandered to the next village. That’s how everything starts. Or else the story could begin, there was a witch, her name was Ellen, and Ellen had time off from her job, and it was Saturday, so she got in her Volvo and drove to the next town, which happened to be Elizabeth, New Jersey.
KRASINSKI: What sort of reader do you imagine wants to read this kind of tale?
KOESTENBAUM: Readers of exquisite macabre taste who share our appetite for the incongruous and the refractory.
KRASINSKI: How can we be living in such a vulgar time and yet so much of contemporary fiction—even the so-called experimental—seems utterly devoted to some outmoded sense of propriety?
KOESTENBAUM: Isn’t that wild? And we have a president who is fecal in every aspect, without any of the good aspects of the fecal. My choice to situate the novel in peripheries of cities and to leave some of the characters unnamed is maybe a wish to concentrate on contemporary crisis without specifying any of it. Namelessness permits me to think more sternly about contemporary emergencies.
I love literature in a selfish way because I love the space of dreaming that can happen when I am writing. Writing is very hard, and I so often want to flee a process I find agonizing. But for the most part, and certainly with a project like this novel, I felt that the escape into writing was truly liberating. Even if it was difficult, it was liberating and in the deepest sense, antisocial. I loved fleeing from the confines of real size and real shape and even real gender. And going into the liminal. It was really liberating to say, I’m going to stop desiring real people. I’m going to just put all my desire into fictional people.
KRASINSKI: So liberating, isn’t it?
KOESTENBAUM: I have the rabbi. I don’t need any of you.
Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and an editor at Bidoun.