3.0
Margery Kempe
ByPublisher Description
Lust, religious zeal, and heartache come together in this provocative novel about two infatuations, one between a man and his young lover in the late 20th century and another between a 15th-century maiden and Jesus Christ.
First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century. The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel. Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."
First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century. The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel. Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities7 Reviews
3.0
MK
Created 8 days agoShare
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“is anything more beautiful or true than making divine and horrendous your own yearning and suffering? grotesque, lurid and stunning in moments. Bob Gluck, i love how you love!!! “Perhaps Gender is the extent we go in order to be loved””
Iacin
Created 7 months agoShare
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Katherine Kelley
Created 9 months agoShare
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“Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe is best known as the first English autobiography, though “autobiography” is almost a misnomer: the endeavor took three scribes to transcribe her words. The remaining fingerprints these men left on her story are unclear, but because of the circumstances in which her Book was written, her whole perspective has been lost to time. Robert Glücks’s historical novel (or is it a memoir? Or is it a work of pornography?) Margery Kempe adds another voice to the din.
Margery Kempe exists somewhere between biography and erotic (?) fiction. Part of the book is an altered retelling of Margery’s life as she is repeatedly “visited” and “known” by Jesus in a biblical sense. The other follows the relationship between Bob (a Jewish writer in his 40s and the narrator of the entire book) and “L,” a man in his 20s from a “WASP”-y family. The latter plotline, such as it is, takes heavy inspiration from Robert Glück’s life. The two stories occasionally melt together in a confusing, self-insert-y way, resulting in a book that blurs reality and fiction in a bizarre sexual fever dream.
My initial reaction to Margery Kempe was that it was a distasteful portrayal of a real woman by a man who seems not to know any women, let alone Margery Kempe. Then, I read her memoir and saw that it was much worse than I thought. While the sacrilegious portrayal of Jesus in the novel is meant to be transgressive and push buttons, Glück’s decision to “queer” The Book of Margery Kempe isn’t as upsetting as his choice to erase the sexual violence within it. In her memoir, Margery describes repeated experiences of marital rape after she takes a vow of celibacy that her husband refuses to honor. Anthony Bale’s translation describes her lamentation over “conjugal debt,” saying, “He would have his way with her, and she obeyed with great weeping and sorrowing because she could not live in chastity.” She later denies hating her husband yet shows disdain for having to take care of him in his old age and has a visceral fear of being raped for the rest of her account. All of this is completely removed from Margery Kempe, which not only fails in Glück’s collaborative intent but also fails the woman herself.
When it comes to the question of whether authors have a duty to their historical subjects, I don’t ask, “Should authors do this?” but, “Do their choices match the goal of the novel?” In the essay that comes with the book, “My Margery, Margery’s Bob,” Glück writes: “I wanted to use Margery’s story, but also to let it alone.” In this, he fails. All the rough edges of Margery’s life are removed. And although this book isn’t a ‘cleansed’ version of her life, the way events are picked and chosen is disturbing. Her constant wailing and crying about her faith make her difficult for modern readers but also more sympathetic, and this affective response is mostly removed.
The book flirts with an authoritative tone by quoting Margery in her original language, but the reality is far from authoritative. I don’t think Glück intends to come across as a historical authority, but his decision to quote from her memoir betrays that intent. The reader would be forgiven for thinking that any of the events in the book happened as they were told. Glück doesn’t just make up things to make her story sexier, drawing comparisons between her life and Bob’s; he also makes up random things. According to her memoir, she didn’t come onto a roofer, and there’s nothing to suggest that he was 15, as the novel claims:
The roofer was fifteen years old, so young his orgasms didn’t matter...When she found the roofer her face sank in lust, her mouth an O. She asked him directly to have sex. “I’d rather be chopped up for stew-meat in a pot,” he drawled with lazy malice. With a nod Margery understood that failure was intrinsic, success merely an exception.
Margery describes this event in her memoir as unwanted sexual harassment, and she offers to have sex with him because the man previously threatened to rape her. In an interview with the LA Review of Books, Glück says of his portrayal of Margery, “Say it’s drag, and she’s the 15th-century Cher.” I assume most drag queens don’t show Cher as the aggressor in her sexual assault.
In some scenes, you could say that Glück empowers Margery through her sexual agency. This doesn’t quite hold, though, given that someone outside of an abusive situation cannot ‘reclaim’ that trauma and because Glück repeatedly undercuts this reading. Multiple times, he refers to Margery and women in general as passive in sexual situations. The sexual violence that is described in the book almost shifts the blame back onto Margery: “The Mayor took Margery by the hand and led her into his chamber; he told her he wanted to lick her breasts, that his cock was stiff and he wanted her to taste it…Margery felt giddy, that her body betrayed her by blushing.” This isn’t the only example of this, as Margery Kempe again and again reinforces myths central to rape culture and misogyny.
I don’t want to kink-shame, but the descriptions of sexual encounters are simply unpleasant to read. Because of this book, I have the image of Jesus fingering his side-wound in my head for the rest of my life. Nothing about this book's title or cover shows the reader what they’re getting into. The painting by Yannis Tsarouchis that makes up the cover looks more like a historical painting than anything that would show the “farce” of the novel, as Glück describes it. It courts the kind of reader that it is trying to avoid.
Bob is blinded by his identification with Kempe, and I suspect Glück may have been, too. As he writes, “I want to be a woman and a man penetrating him, his inner walls rolling around me like satin drenched in hot oil, and I want to be the woman and man he continually fucks. I want to be where total freedom is. I push myself under the surface of Margery’s story, holding my breath for a happy ending to my own.” This book is gross, not just because of its sex scenes involving breastfeeding from Jesus, creative uses of his side wound, etc., but because of its unthinking reflection of society's ideas about women. It’s not that Glück does nothing with this; he tries to use these tropes to his advantage and fails. We have the classic: women’s nipples being used as a sign of sexual arousal and many more thoughtless tropes from porn involving women. Also, "Margery started to whimper; her ovaries were sponges that soaked up energy from people and situations.” Ovaries don’t work that way.
Indeed, the sexual scenes aren’t just terrible because I’m a prude or because they’re offensive. There are also inscrutable scenes like this: "I reconstruct the memory of that access as a ruin, a hollow space inside meaning, a vehicle for travel. Still, Jesus can lift me out of time to be his lover.” Good to know, guy. What the fuck?
I admit that erotica is not my thing, but even looking past how I may be biased against this kind of novel, it fails on its own terms. The best parts of the book are the interrogations of power imbalances in sexual relationships, but even that doesn’t go far enough. Bob is much older than “L,” but “L” comes from a much more privileged background. So interesting! Too bad it goes unresolved. The criticism of Jesus as a kind of abusive husband is almost a refreshing and radical take, but the meta-reality of the book undermines it. It’s infuriating.
Reading this book was like being in a horrifying nightmare or the second circle of hell if it had a bunch of birds in it for no reason (if that sounds out of nowhere, it’s because it is). The novel’s descriptions of physicality were suffocating. I would recommend this as some campy smut for a day or something to read to your friends to see their reaction, but unfortunately, the reality of the woman at the center of the novel ruins even the entertainment that could bring. Who is this book for? I suspect it’s for no one.”
Nikki
Created 9 months agoShare
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“2.5”
About Robert Gluck
Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and editor. With Bruce Boone, he founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco. His poetry collections include Reader and, with Boone, La Fontaine. His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith, and the novel Jack the Modernist. Glück edited, with Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative, and his collected essays, Communal Nude, appeared in 2016. Glück served as the director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, co-director of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. He lives in San Francisco.
Colm Tóibín is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His latest book is Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce.
Colm Tóibín is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His latest book is Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce.
Other books by Robert Gluck
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