W ayne Koestenbaum has built himself a slow-burn reputation as one of America’s sharpest queer iconoclasts, but the title of his latest novel suggests Netflix-ready realism. Will My Lover, the Rabbi be a sober yet uplifting account of the conflict between religious orthodoxy and forbidden desire? Not a bit of it. The book’s central and anchoring fact – the overwhelming desire of a man who works as an antique furniture restorer for a man who works in a synagogue – is accepted as a given by every single character. The writing, meanwhile, treats all realist convention with a kind of exalted scorn, conjuring the dangers and delights of obsession in prose that is itself unashamedly obsessive – and wonderfully frank when it gets down to the physical details. The result is as fierce and strange as anything you’re going to read this year. The fierceness begins immediately. All the book’s 188 chapters are short, but the first one comes in at only four lines.…