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A review by jisimpson
I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro
4.0
On the surface Jamie Quatro’s fiction focuses on things most people would rather not talk about: sex, religion, death, infidelity, phone sex. But Quatro almost immediately pulls you in, writing with such intense clarity, intelligence, deep wit and beauty about characters who give themselves over entirely to the physical as well as the spiritual in their unfulfilled lives.
Throughout the connected stories, we follow a woman in her late 30s as she begins and ends a long-distance phone-sex relationship with a friend of her husband. The stories range from traditional to fabulist, casting an unflinching and brutally honest eye on the nature of judgment, guilt, faith, family and death, while seeking their reflections in forgiveness, redemption, doubt, and perseverance. This dualism is strikingly evident in the location -- all of the stories take place in and around Lookout Mountain, Georgia, a town straddling the Georgia/Tennessee border (almost a fairytale land with whimsical street names), where Quatro lives with her husband and four children.
In “Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives”, a husband and wife are faced with the corpse of the woman’s would-be lover rotting in their bed after the long-distance affair has been broken off. Quatro compares the sense of loss and grief at the relationship’s end to the stages of decomposition: “III. Active Decay: in which the greatest loss of mass occurs. Purged fluids accumulate around the body, creating a cadaver decomposition island (CDI).” Reading this, I found it equally repulsive and hilarious, but I couldn’t turn away. In a nod to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Quatro describes the dead lover with black goo oozing from its crumbling jaws. It’s a story that sticks with you.
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” is one of the more fabulist in the collection, about a near-future marathon race where entrants -- depending on their running prowess -- are given (mostly phallic, mostly heavy) statues that they must carry in backpacks throughout the entire race. This was one of the more surprising in the book, and one I can imagine being studied and dissected and discussed at length in any graduate writing program workshop.
Two of the stories pay homage to Eudora Welty and Steven Millhauser in style (she couldn’t have chosen two finer writers to emulate), but with Quatro’s own unique twists.
Overall, this is an exceptionally well done debut from a talented author with great talent and a bright future.
Throughout the connected stories, we follow a woman in her late 30s as she begins and ends a long-distance phone-sex relationship with a friend of her husband. The stories range from traditional to fabulist, casting an unflinching and brutally honest eye on the nature of judgment, guilt, faith, family and death, while seeking their reflections in forgiveness, redemption, doubt, and perseverance. This dualism is strikingly evident in the location -- all of the stories take place in and around Lookout Mountain, Georgia, a town straddling the Georgia/Tennessee border (almost a fairytale land with whimsical street names), where Quatro lives with her husband and four children.
In “Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives”, a husband and wife are faced with the corpse of the woman’s would-be lover rotting in their bed after the long-distance affair has been broken off. Quatro compares the sense of loss and grief at the relationship’s end to the stages of decomposition: “III. Active Decay: in which the greatest loss of mass occurs. Purged fluids accumulate around the body, creating a cadaver decomposition island (CDI).” Reading this, I found it equally repulsive and hilarious, but I couldn’t turn away. In a nod to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Quatro describes the dead lover with black goo oozing from its crumbling jaws. It’s a story that sticks with you.
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” is one of the more fabulist in the collection, about a near-future marathon race where entrants -- depending on their running prowess -- are given (mostly phallic, mostly heavy) statues that they must carry in backpacks throughout the entire race. This was one of the more surprising in the book, and one I can imagine being studied and dissected and discussed at length in any graduate writing program workshop.
Two of the stories pay homage to Eudora Welty and Steven Millhauser in style (she couldn’t have chosen two finer writers to emulate), but with Quatro’s own unique twists.
Overall, this is an exceptionally well done debut from a talented author with great talent and a bright future.