Is Jamie Quatro’s novel really about marital infidelity?

In Jamie Quatro’s ambitious debut novel, Maggie is a 45-year-old mother of two, devoted to her family and to God. When she falls in love with James, a poet she meets at a conference, desire and guilt war within her, both before and after their one night together. The story unfolds in a nonchronological pastiche of forms: first-person narrative, third-person narrative, descriptive prose poems, emails, text messages, prayers, a sermon, and dialogues between Maggie and an anonymous partner (or partners) who could be a therapist, God, or an internal devil’s advocate. The unconventional form works—especially the correspondence between Maggie and James, which perfectly nails the elaborately casual tone adopted in email early in a relationship. Quatro’s prose is poetic, economical, and effective.

But Fire Sermon lacks the electrifying power of the stories in Quatro’s first collection, I Want to Show You More. Her short fiction is weird, gothic, startling, and profound, reminiscent of the work of Flannery O’Connor and Gabriel García Márquez. Fire Sermon is missing that charged magic. The novel ruminates on the relationship between desire and faith, but ultimately it fails to deliver profound or convincing revelations about the nature of either.

Part of the problem is that the characters are so pretentious and privileged. Maggie and James are people who read Moby-Dick in its entirety to their third-grade children. They discuss apophatic literature and postcolonial reinterpretations of Genesis. When they meet for the first time, Maggie notices James’s tattoos: on one wrist, the word sight, and on the other, vision.