Book Review | My Destroyer, My Meteorite
By Wayne Koestenbaum
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 464 pp.
It could be wisdom, it could be wads of cash, it could be the transgression of it all, but the older man as an object of desire is common in literary fiction. He could be commandeering or empty, obtuse or clear, but he’s a little out of reach. Recently, it felt like I couldn’t walk into a bookstore without picking up a novel that featured a younger, sometimes unnamed, narrator dealing with their attraction to an older man—Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation, Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, Maya Kessler’s Rosenfeld, Raven Leilani’s Luster, Jessica Gross’s Hysteria all came in quick succession and were filled with quick, overwhelming desire. This history could make Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi seem like a done-before novel, if it weren’t for the ridiculous extent to which the two main characters, both men, tolerate, abuse and depend on each other.
“To the rabbi,” Koestenbaum’s narrator begins, “I’d 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.”
Koestenbaum, a historian for the gay rights movement whose essays go from Jackie Onassis to the concept of humiliation to Andy Warhol, wastes no time detailing the pair’s psychosexual and oblique power dynamic in his first novel in over 20 years. The narrator, an antiques restorer who describes himself as “more of a Mopsy doll than a man,” is completely at the mercy of the older, married rabbi, a semi-bearded man who had suffered a mental break a couple years ago, had to give up his congregation but has since returned. The rabbi visits his husband in Charlottesville, then returns to New Jersey to critique the narrator’s gaps in intelligence, “growth-sites for immaturity.” The rabbi shows up naked at his door, begging for sex. The narrator admits he doesn’t have “the knowledge to decode” what he describes as the rabbi’s “own chronicle of vibratory wisdom, his own master-text, mystic inscriptions,” and yet they hypnotize and engulf him in a religious yearning. It’s a dysfunctional match made in heaven.
The narrator burrows deeper into the rabbi’s life and surroundings, turning the novel into a hero’s quest, if such a journey were Jewish, neurotic and broadly sexual.
What begins as almost a diary of sex—the first 30 or so chapters filled to the brim with bodily enchantment and romantic politicking—flows outward as the narrator turns to the rabbi’s circle, all wonderfully named: Monica Prague, the rabbi’s housekeeper, personal assistant and friend of the family; Dito, the nephew the rabbi took in after his parents died; Pablo Rowlands, Dito’s friend and lover; Doc Zimmerman, head of the Anti-Pontificators, an organization ideologically aligned and physically next to the rabbi’s synagogue; Ari and Eli Aramillo, brothers who own a jewelry shop; and Carla and Rockland, the rabbi’s former wife and their son, respectively, both deceased—Carla from suicide, Rockland from troubles related only to what people refer to as his “difference.” (The narrator, almost tastelessly, wants to know about them most of all). The novel sprawls, rejoicing in its narrative that burrows and fractures like separate paths in an ant farm, absurd spectacles and dreamlike revelations. The way people speak is obtuse and formal, meant to evade: “We’re not Monica’s victims, we’re her beneficiaries,” the rabbi says, justifying Monica’s decision to enfold Dito within her Imperial Plaza Apartments complex after Dito suffers a mental breakdown. “We receive grace and absolution from Monica’s distortions, her bent convictions.”
The narrator burrows deeper into the rabbi’s life and surroundings, turning the novel into a hero’s quest, if such a journey were Jewish, neurotic and broadly sexual. Koestenbaum’s overwhelming attention to detail through his winding sentences results sometimes in headache, but most often they shine with brilliance. During sex, the narrator documents everything, “lest a single erotic instant go to its grave without receiving linguistic tribute.” Koestenbaum, thankfully, applies the same strategy; his world is ripe for the taking, and he turns the smallest interstitial moments of the human condition into a memorable experience worthy of being catalogued.
All of the narrator’s intrusions—trying to parent Dito, making inroads with Monica, trying to figure out the mystery of the rabbi’s family, wandering into a jewelry shop named after Rockland and relentlessly questioning the clerk—are efforts to to force himself into the rabbi’s life, by any means necessary. “Was the possibility of becoming Rockland still open to determined applicants?” he wonders at one point, as if irritated and galvanized by the amount of focus the dead three-year-old takes up in the rabbi’s mind. Rockland is, he laments, “a dead boy who seemed to have more life in him than I could claim.”
Terrified of being temporary, his actions, by turns selfish and neurotic, are an attempt to finagle himself into the rabbi’s being. And though it means being there for him in distress, it also means having sex with his dogwalker and his husband. (This is allowed; the husband assures: “We do dicks, not secrets.”) Yet his focus remains on the rabbi. “Toward the jungle of the rabbi’s attachment to me I would retain primary loyalty,” the narrator pledges. “I needed the beasts as much as I needed the shafts of light that poured through the treetops in the season when the forest suffered its annual diminishment of canopy.”
That the narrator remains so puny in the eye of the rabbi is endlessly erotic to the narrator, and might even be what he prefers. It’s no wonder, he thinks, that a rabbi, a towering figure of community and knowledge, wouldn’t be madly in love with an antiques repairman, and instead would treat him as fun yet disposable. Though we spend the novel inside the narrator’s spiraling thoughts, he deliberately minimizes himself in relation to the rabbi, who himself is unpredictable and temperamental. The narrator’s body is only worth something when the rabbi spits on it—a contract readily signed by both parties. “I was a sub-gnat, a fleck of croissant on the swollen bottom lip of the rabbi’s least desirable acolyte,” the narrator thinks.
But this is where their magic happens. The narrator, not stuck but perfectly snug even in an overwhelming swirl of information, mystery and delusion, is at home with this hunky asshole. His body is a playground, his mind is a workshop and his history is a puzzle waiting to be solved. “He was born to mock me, and I was born to be mocked,” the narrator realizes. Isn’t it nice to know where you belong?
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