Our favorite criticism of the week includes Daniel Felsenthal on Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi, Becca Rothfeld on Arthur C. Brooks’ The Meaning of Your Life, Robert Rubsam on Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, Daniel Mendelsohn on Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody, and Giles Harvey on Ben Lerner’s Transcription.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

“Sigmund Freud believed that every crush has a strand of disgust, that people are attracted to what repulses them. The Vienna doctor may no longer be a reigning scientific authority, yet he landed upon an emotional truth and one with literary resonance to boot: The enchantment of an infatuation always counterbalances the reality that our lovers — irksome, confusing, and unflaggingly human — depart from whatever ideal archetype we have stored in our heads.

Maybe this is why My Lover, the Rabbi , the rare novel by the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum, is the most convincing depiction of romance I’ve read in…