"Fire Sermon," by Jamie Quatro

Jamie Quatro’s intense new novel, “Fire Sermon” (Grove Press, 2018) has received high praise for its depiction of extramarital desire and longing, mixed with desire and longing for God. The cover of the book is bright red, and there is much talk about burning. The main character, Maggie, is a professor and writer and in a marriage of some years to Thomas; they have two children. She meets an also-married poet/professor whom she only sees at academic conferences, but with whom she carries out an intense ongoing conversation, replete with poetry and various literary talk, by phone and email. They agonize about being unfaithful to their spouses, and about wanting to but not being able to stay away from each other. They try to rationalize their relationship as just an intense friendship. All of this is, of course, self-delusion. It's not an unusual plot. But what makes it different than the usual such novel is the way the story, relationship, and correspondence are all enmeshed in the adulterous couple’s feverish, high-flown, theologically/poetically-inflected interchanges. Forgive me if this makes me sound like a philistine, but this over-the-top, self-involved, self-important ongoing conversation smacks of literary/metaphysical self-indulgence, and I found myself getting quite impatient with it.