The novel is filled with images of the body, of pure carnality and quick desire. In their introduction to the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy wrote: “Before there was crowd-sourcing, Bob [Glück] was asking his friends and students to provide lists of body sensations that he subsequently sifted into his novel on Margery Kempe.” The novel allows religious devotion itself to soar above the mere business of prayer and obedience into a realm that is filled with the possibilities of bliss and fulfillment, not only for the soul but for the body, the body that holds the center of each side panel of the triptych.

The figure of Jesus in the novel is brought to earth. He is all sex and sinew. Margery’s devotion is not to the word Jesus preached or the promise of heaven, it is to his flesh, the living reality of his presence on earth, his mundane existence. His lubricity, rather than his preaching, is his allure.

“The tension between masculine-feminine and inside-outside pervades all levels of my community,” the narrator writes. On the same page, it is as though the narrator’s desire for L. and Margery’s for Jesus become interwoven, just as, soon afterward, words like “man,” “woman,” “me,” “I,” “he” start to become interpenetrative. Soon the sexual desire in the novel becomes a single one, or one in which all boundaries have been threatened. “I push myself under the surface of Margery’s story, holding my breath for a happy ending to my own.”

If this is intense, then its earnestness will not be allowed to dominate. It will soon be thwarted by Jesus saying to Margery that he would like to send her “to Jerusalem and to Rome” and Margery replying: “Jesus, where will I get the money?” For any reader, “Jesus” here will have two meanings: one to denote the figure in the New Testament, the other a casual word often placed at the beginning of a sentence to express wonder, worry, or surprise. No matter what, the tone has shifted. If the reader’s expectations are simple, they will have been wrong-footed. The narrative will have claimed a small victory over easy expectation and gained energy accordingly.

In Part Two of the book, Margery, complete with her visions and free of all fear, sets out with a group on a pilgrimage. She speaks her mind and that alarms her fellow pilgrims. The writing about nature and travel comes to us ambiguously, many declarative sentences denoting the look or feel of things as in an ordinary novel, but each of them having an edge of pastiche, put there for show, as though cut and pasted from an imagined kitty of earlier sources to make sure we take nothing for granted.