End of the affair
Jamie Quatro’s novel is a powerful exploration of lust, longing and faith, writes
There are books with front doors, through which the reader walks right in, and there are books with side doors. Side-door books take more interpretive work, but yield special pleasures. Jamie Quatro’s fantastic new novel, Fire Sermon ,isa side-door book. The novel delivers its story through a variety of methods: first-person confessions, “fictional” third-person descriptions, letters, emails, questionnaires, Socratic dialogues with the self. Roiling, raw and sensual on the surface, this mazy novel rewards a second reading.
The plot is simple: a married woman is trying to forget her lover. The woman, Maggie Ellmann, a contented mother of two grown children, meets James, a married poet, at a conference. They spend two years falling into a long-distance emotional affair. This culminates in a single, searing night together in Chicago, after which they part for good. In her unsent letters to James, Maggie struggles to find a theological framework for her longing and her pain. In one such letter, she admires the Buddhist notion of death as the ultimate lack of attachment, noting “What relief there would be in no longer longing to feel, again, your whiskers on my inner thighs.”
The novel dips back through time to track life before the affair. The mores of the Ellmanns’ lives are exceedingly conventional, as are many of the novel’s touchstones – weddings, baptisms, the death of pets. But the way this slim book condenses these happenings in the context of the affair gives them poetry. Lyrical lists of domestic detritus contain the sweetness of child-rearing, as well as a mysterious sense of loss. Some of this has to do with her habitual surrendering of her own body to others, most especially during sex, into which her usually benign husband manipulates and bullies her. Middle age looms. The children grow into complicated teenagers, then leave for college.
Maggie’s husband Thomas is a good sort, although we hear little from him here. The marriage has its problems, but the biggest one is its earthly limitations, the waning of interest and desire – its mortality. Only if a person were “married to God” would she or he have a partner who would never suffer from overfamiliarity.
God is crucial to Fire Sermon. Quatro’s protagonist is genuinely at a loss over the contradictions of her specifically Christian body, one that is both devout and also full of appetite. Maggie genuinely cannot understand how to religiously interpret her adultery. She is full of guilt, but also suspects that she uses “guilt as fuel, guilt as food, guilt as energy.” In the next breath she wonders why she can’t just give in to her desires if God has already granted “eternal forgiveness from before all time.” She doesn’t know whether to believe the pastor at her parents’ church, who says: “God wants your holiness, not your happiness . ... All of history ... is one long terrible story of men and women trying to make themselves happy.”
James and Maggie’s epistolary affair is divulged in the last third of the book. These letters show that although their belief in God unites them, so does their status as artists (unlike their bland, loving spouses, who avoid poetic shoptalk). Maggie and James don’t just want to talk God with another believer; they want to talk God as poets. Writing poetry makes Maggie feel awake again.
Occasionally, their correspondence feels as private and awkward as such a seduction would be, their letters – and their theological discussions
– flecked with the pretension of two people trying to impress each other (as when James brags of having read Moby-dick to his eight-year-old daughter “in its entirety”). But when Maggie is alone with her thoughts, she provides plenty of frisson. The novel traces a perceptive mind in process, one that often challenges its claims as soon as they are made.
What keeps people from blowing up their lives in the name of passion, if not fear of God? Does betrayal feel worse when it’s also sin, a breach of one’s religious beliefs?
Fire Sermon offers an unflinching description of that kind of pain. The sentences burn with desire and disquiet. The novel is generously condensed, ardently focused, its mechanisms poetic, not expository. In fact, although it is fiction, the book reminds me most of confessional poetry, the aim of which is uncompromising honesty and selfexposure. You may enter this book through an interest in poetry or theology, but once you are there, it shows you more.