by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

What troubles Maggie in the novel “Fire Sermon” isn’t her betrayal of her husband, but that she likes being bad and wants God to walk with her into Hell. In the new millennium, to question infidelity in Godly terms might seem quaint or proselytizing in the hands of a less gifted author. Jamie Quatro’s opening scene shows a married woman willingly letting herself be led across the line of infidelity and then jumps back in time to the woman’s wedding day. The reader quickly knows the players and setup: an extravagant, formal wedding; brilliant beautiful woman marries brilliant beautiful man; a few allusions to dark moments that have occurred both earlier and later. The groom’s uninvited father who abandoned the family, the bride’s younger brother who gets stoned and eats the top tier of the cake saved in the freezer for the couple’s first anniversary, suggestions of rough treatment by the groom in premarital sex prepare the reader for a journey into a less than idyllic future—but unhappy marriages are the stuff of many novels.

Thomas, the husband is for the most part a nice guy. Maggie could be just another woman who abandoned her doctorate program in comparative literature to raise children who seeks the fantasy reality of an affair to recapture what the self felt like when its own needs mattered most. But Quatro takes Maggie’s transgression into an uncharted dimension. Maggie doesn’t want the scales to fall from her eyes so she “will see the evil behind the pleasure.” Maggie demands of God, “allow me at least the memory unrepented…Let me keep it, God…to be allowed to remain in a state of lust.”

Maggie never contemplates leaving her husband, although she does entertain telling him about her affair—but never does, because she doesn’t want her marriage to end either. Both her husband and lover hurt her sexually, but with her lover she likes the pain, not so with her husband. She fears if the forbidden aspect of her relationship with her lover James were removed, the pleasure would disappear.

The reader travels with Maggie through 23 years of marriage and beyond. As a young child, her daughter Kate begins a pattern of physical abuse that she finally outgrows, which cure the therapist ironically attributes to Maggie and Thomas’ loving relationship—“When love is present in the home, children almost always emerge beautifully into adulthood.” In truth, for years Maggie has faked orgasm and as often as possible avoided making love to her husband. She’s entertained erotic infatuations with other men, but never followed through, until when her children are teenagers she writes to the poet James Abbott and James replies.

Why James? Coincidence litters the surface. James and Maggie are the same age and their children are the same ages and genders. But far more significant is the singularity—and isolation—of being Christians in a post-Christian America. Husband Thomas, an agnostic, accepts Maggie’s spirituality, spirituality which exists largely in the background for Maggie until James appears on the scene.

Perhaps James is a stand in for God, practice for the radical conclusion drawn by the “Fire Sermon” imbedded in the narrative. The story begins in the 1990s and continues into Maggie and Thomas’ old age, past the date of the novel’s publication and the date of this review. Maggie’s talks with her therapist give way to internal dialogues with the alter ego telling the self the tale will end “how I want it to end.”

For the reader, after being lured by Quatro into “Fire Sermon’s” daring journey through the heart of erotic desire, the most salient question is “What’s next?”