Here we have an early fifteenth century swirling with images of sex and gender, and then this pastoral landscape disrupted by contemporary concerns, as in: “Women carded and combed, clouted and washed, and peeled rushes. . . . One woman became a man when he jumped over an irrigation ditch and his cunt dropped inside out: gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved. His mittens were made of rags.”

That last sentence may seem unnecessary, or just tagged on, but it is not. First of all, after the previous assertion, which requires us to stop for a moment, the sentence about the mittens seems natural, encouraging us to read on. It is the sort of odd detail that fiction thrives on, appearing to be part of the random visible world rather than the writer’s efforts to manage reality and create schemes. Also, the sentence has a rhythm and a sound that could be from a ballad.

When stray sentences in the novel, such as “They talked till stars appeared above the elms,” have a full iambic pentameter sound, it is as though they have earned their keep against the surrounding mixture of the dead serious, the parodic, the flippant, the urgent, and the real. As in “His mittens were made of rags,” they have a way of restoring the possibility of innocence to a simple statement in sonorous prose. In Communal Nude: Collected Essays, Glück wrote: “In my novel Margery Kempe . . . each sentence is a kind of promise, an increment of hope that replaces the broken promise of the last sentence. What is that promise? That the world will continue, that one image will replace the next forever—that is, the world will respond to your love by loving you back. The silence is that of a world about to be born.”

Just as Margery goes to Venice, so too do our twentieth-century lovers. When Glück writes “Venice grew crowded as spring progressed. At dusk the population spilled into the streets and piazzas, sweetly murmurous, still dazed from the light,” it is playfully clear that this is what both Margery and the lovers experienced. They have been captured in time. In Communal Nude, Glück wrote: “History is endlessly porous; so instead of creating a middle distance, I used extreme close-ups, historical long shots, and autobiography.”

They have also been captured in prose, brought into our presence courtesy of style. There are times when the couplings between the narrator and L. require a style that is lofty, distant, made up of disparate moments, creating images of lovers who are singularly unclose. Margery and Jesus, on the other hand, experience a coupling that is more passionate and open and demands the unembarrassed style of romance writing: “She lay facing him, her red hair fanned out behind. Arms and legs draped over each other, lips touched in ardent peace.”