If one threaded Vladimir Nabokov's obsessive eros through an exploration of religious devotion, it might look something like Curt Leviant's superbly entertaining Katz or Cats: Or, How Jesus Became My Rival in Love.
Like Russian nesting dolls, the novel is relayed as a novel within a novel. John, a book editor, meets the land surveyor Katz on a New Jersey train. Katz shares with John a manuscript his brother wrote about falling in love with a religious woman named Maria. Leviant has tremendous fun with this self-reflective narrative structure. John is bewildered more than once as he tries to determine fact from fiction, Katz from his twin brother--also named Katz--and just how much the former is revising and reshaping the novel as it's being told.
But it is the story of Maria that steals the show. Katz, the twin brother, falls hard for the single, aloof, cat-obsessed Maria, who is torn between sexual desire and her Christian piety. She admits she loves Katz but loves Christ even more and eventually stops sleeping with her lover. Thus Katz, who's Jewish, must compete with an entire theology. "Oppressed by the dense melancholy of memories," he obsesses about how to get Maria back into the bedroom. Leviant uses the conflict to explore both sexual love and religious devotion, suggesting the two are related. The sex scenes have an ecstatic quality, likened to musical scales, and the repartee between the two characters is filled with witty wordplay.
Katz is a heady love story worth the narrative convolutions. Funny and sad at the same time, the novel manages to get at the heart of something profound. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset