Returning to fiction for the first time in 20 years, Wayne Koestenbaum’s new novel My Lover, the Rabbi unfolds as an unflinching enquiry into the self-consuming grammar of want: the way longing loops back on itself, feeding not on its object but on its own appetite. In conversation with author and short fiction writer Nate Lippens, whose books include My Dead Book (2021), Ripcord (2024) and the forthcoming Bastards (2026), the writers discuss the novel’s eclectic cultural inheritance, from Renaissance poetry and Talmudic arcana to stud files and vaudeville.

Nate Lippens My Lover, the Rabbi is almost a quest novel, a quest for the beloved. The narrator keeps throwing himself into ever deeper adventures. Was that something you were thinking about while writing it?

Wayne Koestenbaum The quest aspect came about because, in order to spin a narrative, to keep going in language continuously, you have to be looking for something. Language is the vehicle for attaining this idol, literalised in the body of the rabbi, which the narrator already possesses at the very beginning. It’s not just a quest novel, it’s a circular and pointless quest novel!

NL The melancholy of not possessing his body enough feels like a very homosexual thematic. The narrator circles around that in a hilarious way that gives you vertigo. You’ve said that writing the book gave you a sense of how your mind worked. How vulnerable did you feel writing it?

WK The experience of writing it was very private, especially because I’m not as experienced in the novel form, or finding an outlet for publication, not that this is ever guaranteed. Embarking on writing an erotic dream quest novel in my notebooks by hand was an experience of diaristic melancholy. It was an obsessed inscription that I prayed would look from the outside like a novel. We homosexual writers live in the shadow of Baron Corvo’s The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1961); we’re always in search of the unattainable lover. We try to find deeply inappropriate love objects so that the quest for them remains perpetually unsatisfying, thereby producing better research into the nature of desire. Choosing the rabbi as this inaccessible object of desire gave me a better cache of material about male desire. I am always in quest of finding new ways to approach the phallus: let’s defamiliarise it, let’s make it as strange as possible. That’s our terrain.

NL I love that he’s not very good at being a rabbi: all of the social privileges that should be status indicators reveal themselves not to be. In a strange way, those are his most appealing traits. There is an odd, flaky, optimistic way of being out in the world for him that appeals to me because of its wrongness. You know that it’s going to run up against so many problems.

WK To his credit, he has a synagogue and a Friendship Centre, even though his ownership of the Friendship Centre is dubious. He also has an on-again, off-again relationship with the Anti-Pontificators and private clients, but “flake” is written all over him. I had the narrator give him a copy of Growing Up Absurd (1960) by Paul Goodman, because I sensed that the rabbi was one of those ersatz, quack figures like Wilhelm Reich or Harry Hay: disreputable and orgasmic. The rabbi’s flakiness amplifies his credentials as a radical, sexual, sacred, secular adventurer.

NL It attaches to queer writing about monomania. So many of the books that I return to have monomania at the heart of them.

WK I think that both your books and My Lover, the Rabbi participate in these traditions of trickery and excessive sexual accounting, like Samuel Steward, the tattoo artist and sexual note keeper. A novel for us is a series of notations about bodies that we have passed through.

NL It’s a certain performance of sex that isn’t just sex writing, it’s conceptual. There’s a chapter where the narrator starts talking about the rabbi’s cock and goes on for these gorgeous two pages of total intellectual filth. It becomes so abstract and compounding. Were there any models you were drawing from, or were you just so fully into the flow of the novel by that point that it was coming to you that way?

WK One of these models would be the poetic tradition of the blason, an early Renaissance poem of praise like the Song of Solomon, where there’s a loving enumeration of the beloved’s characteristics. To that extent, it’s a static set piece. Another model would be the still life, or the prose poem in the manner of Francis Ponge or Pablo Neruda, where the poem is a reverent diagnosis and delineation of a seemingly neutral object. To find a space for sexual description, the narrator describes the lover’s body as if reciting a holy song of praise, but also a neutral anatomisation. I was creating mini-stories and narratives through metaphor within the blason, so that the whole chapter is just a praise song for the lover’s cock. We end up on these detours through a figurative delicatessen, so it’s almost as though, within the structure of the metaphor, the tenor and the vehicle are reversed. The first draft of each chapter was written inone sitting. I was within a durational experience, of say,
half an hour; I was within the box of that praise song. My consciousness was in a state of being limited. The obsessional focus of each chapter, its lack of freedom to roam, has something to do with the psychological state of the writer. I drafted the book very quickly over the summer, giving it all my time. I wrote it partly because what was happening in it was something I hadn’t written before. I knew that it would go away if I didn’t drive it to death, but I had to navigate the vehicle to its sordid destination. It’s like being in a dream; you have to complete the quest within the dream because you know you’re going to wake up.

NL All of your work is such a model of compression for me. I am drawn to something you spoke of as your “stacking” of the smaller sections.

WK We are both aphorists who try to boil down a lot of paradoxes and stories into single, defeated sentences.

NL There’s a certain vaudeville history to that snappy aphorising, based on stand-up comedy and poetry.

WK My vaudeville roots are deep but I think I am a victim, not a creator, of my own vaudevillian nature. It’s a pleasant state of victimhood. I enjoy being in thrall to my vaudevillian DNA.

NL The novel has this compression, but also this expansiveness. There are long, gorgeous sentences that interrupt themselves over and over. It’s like a song.

WK As I was composing, I was grateful for finally letting myself write the long sentences that I have always naturally written. My revision process has always been so much about bricolage, collage, reorganising, montage and decomposition of the first draft that the long-sentence origin of most of my prose is disguised. That’s true of a lot of my earlier books, and certainly of my poetry as well, apart from with my so-called “Trance Trilogy”: The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015),  Ultramarine (2022) and Camp Marmalade. These are terse and aphoristic on the local level, but the structure of the books permits a certain gargantuan proportion.

NL There is an epic feel to those books. The expectation would be that they loop around in a particular way, but that is continuously subverted in a way that seems natural to you. It just keeps pushing onward.

WK I am in thrall to my own digressive nature. To allow myself to function as a writer, I have to permit the digression. Digression inevitably subverts topicality; digressions are irreverent, and like filibusters, they prevent legislation from happening. I consider them linguistic opportunities to plumb. I handwrote this novel in separate notebooks: if I had written the novel on the computer or typed it up as I was going along, I could have reread the rushes each day. I think I would have been immensely discouraged. I was afraid to do that; I didn’t want to deflate the impulse.

NL A notebook lends itself to me faking myself out of thinking I’m writing a book, even though that’s all I’m thinking about and doing. Once it hits the computer, it starts to feel real. If I started there, I wouldn’t get very far at all, because I would have already had too much knowledge of what was happening.

WK The hardest thing about finishing this novel, revising and getting it into print, was getting certain things straight. Did they meet in New Paltz or Woodstock? Did the first wife start making jewellery before or after she was married to the rabbi? I got so confused about all that and I didn’t do maps of the prehistories.

NL Someone told me to map out My Dead Book and I said it would look like a movie scene where they bust into the serial killer’s room. That would stop me cold, because I would know I was working on a book. I almost have to cheat on myself to get it done.

WK When I was writing books of nonfiction prose, I would tell myself they were really novels. I would often draft an essay in poetic lines and then convert it to prose afterward. The trick for this book was that I was just writing erotic confessions in my diary.

NL All of my favourite writing feels diaristic, like a journal intended for no one to see. How does it feel when it reaches the public?

WK The zone of being read is a space of wish and improbability and guesswork and a toss of the dice. I pray for readers, and I’m baffled by them when they arrive. I have always wanted to write novels, and I’ve always felt that the novel is an ideal space for me to dwell in as a writer, but it hasn’t been the form I’ve been most encouraged in, or even came most naturally to me. I haven’t made my life as a writer with the novel, but it remains a zone of great value and mystery and aura. I’m unusually pleased that this book has an embodied existence in the world.

NL It’s a collection of so many strands, but with a sense of play and continuation. It doesn’t feel like a station has been arrived at; it feels like it’s part of this really big flow. There’s an addictiveness about that kind of obsession that is instantly fun to read.

WK The plot surprised me when it came about. Plots happen by accident: when you have characters, a plot emerges, because you have to resolve and explain things. I had meant to write a static erotic ode, but it ended up having a plot. I followed the plot and felt somewhat captivated by it, and also deeply unsure of what would happen. I kept what could happen secret from myself until the very end. I know what happens at the end, but ambiguities remain.

NL I was completely surprised in the best possible way. A lot was happening, but if anything happened, it was by mistake.

WK The beat sheet is very important to me. Pierre Guyotat is the king of the beat sheet, which was his renounced description of his writing process as proudly masturbatory. I think it’s obvious in the book that I was influenced by the beat sheet of Henry James. Reading a lot of Henry James a few years ago taught me something about sentence continuity and vaporousness. I learned from him that if the sentences have an illusion of continuity, a lot of ambiguity can be sustained because the sentences are confident about their structure and ongoingness. There doesn’t have to be much going on and there can be speculation about what’s happening. It reminds me of what Isabelle Huppert said about how she doesn’t act when she’s acting. She’s not trying to impersonate a character; she’s just thinking about the character.

NL She says she doesn’t want to know anything about the character; she’s acting the feeling on the page. I thought that was fantastic, because it gives enough space for the viewer to enter into that performance. I’ve always thought of that as something that juxtaposition or fragmentation does.

WK Continuity became my friend with this book. I’ve often told students over the years that they don’t need transitions. I have always cut the transitions in my own writing. It taught me how to be a better writer, to cut the so-called fat. Making sure that every sentence was seamless, rather than being in my usual, more fragmented style, permitted the levitation act that is the book. We are living in a time of imperilled concentration. This is a cliché but it’s true, and the experience of writing this book was a battle on behalf of concentration. I had to remain fiercely concentrated on this book, something that I hadn’t found the strength to do in a long time.

NL Your writing has this quality of total freedom, as though you’ll write or say anything. I know that’s never true for anybody, but I love the illusion. Have you ever written anything that you’ve set aside and not wanted to put out?

WK There are many things. It has often been editors who have done that job for me. In 1996, I wrote a novel called The Future of Beauty that I showed to my agent and an editor, and it didn’t get a very positive response. The plot was a little scandalous and I was worried about getting it published. Perplexingly, I never did anything with it.
I started a novel called The Pillow Book of Harpo Marx, and it was written just like My Lover, the Rabbi. But then I felt sad because I loved Harpo too much to make him a fictional character. I needed to write a nonfiction book about him. I started another novel about the afterlife. It was called Suicide Essay, and I retitled it Fassbinder and Plath, because my favourite scenes were the sex scenes between Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Sylvia Plath that took place in an apartment complex in New Jersey, in the realm of whatI call the three-quarters dead, where you meet all the other people who have killed themselves. Fassbinder and Plath just sit around and masturbate all day. I loved it, and little bits of it got published. I kept on revisiting the Fassbinder and Plath novel, but I think even when I wrote it, and I called it Suicide Essay, I knew that I was writing an unpublishable book. You cannot write sex scenes between Sylvia Plath and Fassbinder. In it, Sylvia Plath fists Fassbinder. Plath loyalists were mad at Ted Hughes, so they’d be really mad at me. Frieda [Hughes] would come after me.

NL The professional Plath biographer class is going to be out for you.

WK My favourite part of Suicide Essay has an inheritance in My Lover, the Rabbi. After a sex scene between Plath and Fassbinder, Plath thinks that she needs to put a bookmark in Fassbinder’s ass to remind her where she was when she was doing her investigations. That notion of ass exploration as research comes up a lot in My Lover, the Rabbi. .