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southernstory 's review for:
Fire Sermon
by Jamie Quatro
There's a lot to distill in this book and I should preface this review with the disclaimer that I probably have way too many filters that I'm viewing the content through, to be able to review this book in a way that seems adequate, fair and non-judgy.
Here's the bottom line: it's another book about a bored housewife who is entering into middle age, has an affair and convinces herself that her affair partner is actually the man that she should have ended up with. Sound familiar? That's because it is. Does the author know it's familiar? Yes (she even has a passage in the book where her character imagines her agent turning down a book based on the same premise because of its familiarity). So Quatro tried to put a twist on the story and attempted to align longing with spirituality. Some of her musings on religion came off to me as deadly accurate and some came off as bad theology.
Along similarly uneven lines, I thought the writing veered between well-crafted and terrible (I think Quatro is a gifted writer but she may write better short stories than novels). There are some "deep" discussions that transpires between the main character, Maggie and her affair partner, James - but it all seems so... smug and self-serving. Sometimes it's akin to listening to a pretentious conversation between two university professors who have never held a job outside of academia, nor have talked to anyone outside of academia (or it's like reading those eye-rolling emails between Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer). It's almost as if the philosophical conversations had to cover up the simple cliche that the characters were trodding down a well-worn path that is as old as time. Maggie has convinced herself that she has finally found love with James, when in reality, she just found someone as insufferable as she is is (although insufferable, I genuinely liked how flawed a character that Maggie was and appreciated that she had a lot of self-awareness for how the optics appear when she talks about herself and the affair).
I liked Maggie's head vs heart tug of war but as far as the actual story goes, the head won and the heart lost. Maggie knows theology on an intellectual level but it seems she's never connected religion to her heart (which seems why her efforts at equating desire and longing with spirituality seem novel to her). She does seem to have connected the written word to her heart, which seems to be why she fell for James, a poet, in the first place. At some point in the story she compares theology to poetry and this was where I was hoping she'd finally make the connection of theology to heart but it seemed to eclipse her.
As far as characters reconciling guilt from sin with forgiveness from God, I think The End Of The Affair does it better. I was never sure as to why exactly Maggie wore religion like it was a shackle and a prison sentence (other than that pesky belief that Christianity frowns upon adultery). Since Maggie was someone who was raised in the church, she seemed to miss the sermons about freedom - and for all of her university knowledge of theology - this critical tenet seems to go unobserved. But it's not only religion that confines Maggie - everything for Maggie is a prison sentence: her husband, her home, her career as a writer, her kids. Maggie is the sort of person who can (and does) go on vacations that are accessible to the wealthy and find misery while on it.
Since this book tried to align longing and desire with theology - I thought that it would have been better had Quatro overlaid the the story with the four major Biblical themes of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration. But as it stands, the book neglected to explore the last two. I do think that hidden in the sub-text of this book is the message of grace and forgiveness (but it gets lost and instead dwells on guilt, shame and self-loathing). The author wants the reader instead to come away with the belief that the frame-work of marriage is valuable because it's the one deterrent to tame our desires. In short, she tweaks the Pence/Billy Graham rule (never be alone with a woman because it could offer a tempting scenario), to society needing marriage because without it, we'd all just be flooded with uncontrollable temptation, mate like rabbits and never be satisfied:
Excerpted from book: "But what if (Brothers, Sisters, bear with me) the institution of marriage was given to us as an intentional breeding ground for illicit desire?...Hear: without the prohibitions against fornication and infidelity, we would sate and sate and sate again, looking always for the next object in which to find fulfillment, we would gratify our longings until we had nothing left to long for, and the ability to long itself died off."
This book may feed the head but it left my heart wanting much more.
Here's the bottom line: it's another book about a bored housewife who is entering into middle age, has an affair and convinces herself that her affair partner is actually the man that she should have ended up with. Sound familiar? That's because it is. Does the author know it's familiar? Yes (she even has a passage in the book where her character imagines her agent turning down a book based on the same premise because of its familiarity). So Quatro tried to put a twist on the story and attempted to align longing with spirituality. Some of her musings on religion came off to me as deadly accurate and some came off as bad theology.
Along similarly uneven lines, I thought the writing veered between well-crafted and terrible (I think Quatro is a gifted writer but she may write better short stories than novels). There are some "deep" discussions that transpires between the main character, Maggie and her affair partner, James - but it all seems so... smug and self-serving. Sometimes it's akin to listening to a pretentious conversation between two university professors who have never held a job outside of academia, nor have talked to anyone outside of academia (or it's like reading those eye-rolling emails between Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer). It's almost as if the philosophical conversations had to cover up the simple cliche that the characters were trodding down a well-worn path that is as old as time. Maggie has convinced herself that she has finally found love with James, when in reality, she just found someone as insufferable as she is is (although insufferable, I genuinely liked how flawed a character that Maggie was and appreciated that she had a lot of self-awareness for how the optics appear when she talks about herself and the affair).
I liked Maggie's head vs heart tug of war but as far as the actual story goes, the head won and the heart lost. Maggie knows theology on an intellectual level but it seems she's never connected religion to her heart (which seems why her efforts at equating desire and longing with spirituality seem novel to her). She does seem to have connected the written word to her heart, which seems to be why she fell for James, a poet, in the first place. At some point in the story she compares theology to poetry and this was where I was hoping she'd finally make the connection of theology to heart but it seemed to eclipse her.
As far as characters reconciling guilt from sin with forgiveness from God, I think The End Of The Affair does it better. I was never sure as to why exactly Maggie wore religion like it was a shackle and a prison sentence (other than that pesky belief that Christianity frowns upon adultery). Since Maggie was someone who was raised in the church, she seemed to miss the sermons about freedom - and for all of her university knowledge of theology - this critical tenet seems to go unobserved. But it's not only religion that confines Maggie - everything for Maggie is a prison sentence: her husband, her home, her career as a writer, her kids. Maggie is the sort of person who can (and does) go on vacations that are accessible to the wealthy and find misery while on it.
Since this book tried to align longing and desire with theology - I thought that it would have been better had Quatro overlaid the the story with the four major Biblical themes of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration. But as it stands, the book neglected to explore the last two. I do think that hidden in the sub-text of this book is the message of grace and forgiveness (but it gets lost and instead dwells on guilt, shame and self-loathing). The author wants the reader instead to come away with the belief that the frame-work of marriage is valuable because it's the one deterrent to tame our desires. In short, she tweaks the Pence/Billy Graham rule (never be alone with a woman because it could offer a tempting scenario), to society needing marriage because without it, we'd all just be flooded with uncontrollable temptation, mate like rabbits and never be satisfied:
Excerpted from book: "But what if (Brothers, Sisters, bear with me) the institution of marriage was given to us as an intentional breeding ground for illicit desire?...Hear: without the prohibitions against fornication and infidelity, we would sate and sate and sate again, looking always for the next object in which to find fulfillment, we would gratify our longings until we had nothing left to long for, and the ability to long itself died off."
This book may feed the head but it left my heart wanting much more.