Fire Sermon

"The chase itself will turn us into monsters if we don't give it up."This is an excruciatingly intimate little novel about a woman, Maggie, balancing her devotion to her husband, Thomas, with her desire for another man, James.Vignettes of Maggie's family life—all the mundane snippets—are juxtaposed with her intellectually, spiritually and emotionally charged email correspondences and encounters with James. Complicating matters even more is Maggie's Christianity and profound devotion to God.Novels that center around religion typically turn me off, but Fire Sermon portrays Maggie's faith in such a metaphysical and intellectual manner that it utterly captivated even me—so I urge you, don't write this novel off because I guarantee you it's much more than what it appears to be. I devoured it in two sittings.Fire Sermon is a gorgeous and cerebral book about the nature of desire and longing—particularly the forbidden kind—and how one woman learns to cope with it.

Jamie Quatro is a fine writer and the last 50 pages of this book were so elegantly written that I wished the entire book had lived up to this promise. But like writers before her, Jamie Quatro strives to align an understanding and devotion to God with a so-called sinful extramarital affair. For this non-believer, it did not work.Maggie is married to Thomas, an imperfect man and father of her two children, who strives and often succeeds in being a good husband. Somewhere along the line, she begins a platonic relationship with James, a formalist poet, who writes about “the apocalyptic suffering created by a market economy.” If that weren’t insufferable enough, both of them seem to view what is portrayed as an intimate and sensual affair through the lends of classic Catholicism.The problem is that the theological overlay competes with the hot passion we, as readers, are supposed to experience through Maggie’s need to have unmet desires met. It is evident that these two are platonic soulmates but true lovers? It didn’t quite come across. And, for those of us who are non-believers, the emphasis on the intellectual denied the big question at the heart of religion: Did Christ in fact, exist in the way it was reported by acolytes 400 years after his death?It becomes increasingly obvious that Maggie is playing mind games to deceive herself and perhaps the reader, about her real needs. Granted, she is in desperate need of religious dialogue. While her exchanges with James are intriguing to read, they seemed head games as opposed to ultimate physical/emotional love—a forced conflation of theology with passion.But oh, the last part. when Maggie is able to state in a clear-eyed manner, “I admit to using my religious beliefs to manipulate, resisting temptation as a means of feeding my own desire.” Or this: “You will say I am condoning sin. Constructing an intellectual scaffolding to justify what should be renounced.”As the intellectual scaffolding begins to be dismantled, we see this novel’s true potential: the tale of a yearning woman, married to a good man, who meets her intellectual soulmate and who, like Icarus, flies too close to the flames. Her big question: “What if God…ordained marriage…to place us into a condition in which erotic desire might thrive.?” By untethering her characters to explore that question, this would have been a very good book indeed.

I wanted to love this book after having read a well-written and positive review of this book authored by a friend of mine. Fire Sermon tells the story of Maggie and her perpetual desire and the guilt and torment her desire causes for her. Maggie marries Thomas, the first man with whom she has sex in college, but her story indicates that while she loves Thomas, she chose to marry him more out of some sense of religious guilt for having sex outside of marriage than because of any feelings of passionate love for Thomas. Nevertheless, Maggie goes back and forth describing Thomas as almost saint-like in his devotion to her, but then also misogynistic in his demands for sex from her.When attempting to pull the reader into understanding her desire and passion for fellow author, James Abbott, there are letters that Maggie writes in her journal and some emails that were actually exchanged between the two. Despite these unsent letters and the exchanged emails, the "passion" between Maggie and James was largely inexplicable to me. I just didn't get it. It may have been the writing. While there were parts of the book where the prose was stunning, for the most part, I thought the prose in this book was pretentious and rather corny. I understand from reading reviews that Jamie Quatro is a talented and well-regarded writer, so I regret that I did not appreciate this book more. Perhaps I need to read more of her work to grasp her style.

I loved Jamie Quatro’s previously published short story collection (I want to Show You More), and I love this debut novel as well. Quatro writes with such careful deliberation, intelligence, and intensity about very intimate subjects (in the case of Fire Sermon, the overlap of adultery and religion). She’s very concise but can conjure complicated emotions with just a couple sentences. I have heard that Quatro is also a poet, and that makes a lot of sense to me given how she writes. I’ll read anything she writes.[P.S. I read this twice in a row....something I'm not sure I've ever done before. The first read was on my Kindle, and I ended up buying the book and re-reading it because I think I lost some of the intensity in the e-book format.]

Floored by this novel. Intense and remarkable. Dismisses this bunk of female authors writing on the "domestic".It focuses both in microscopic detail on a woman, her marriage, childen and affair, and expands to observe on a universal scale. This is love in all forms, sex, life, philosophy, poetry, faith and beyond that a acutely captured poetic prose; surprising, provoking and enthralling fiction. The very definition of the adventures and pleasures of being a reader. Ash.

Absolutely loved this book. It's intense, heartbreaking, poignant and moving. Read it.

The story of an alter life told with passion, laced with a sense of spiritual upliftment. An old story in modern garb.

pretty ordinary. didn't finish it