I heard about this book from Eric’s video where he discussed his top 10 books from every year since he had been on YouTube, and then I almost instantly, months later, from a momentous desire, opened it on my tablet and started reading it because my new favorite BookTuber ‘Jennifer’ @InsertLitPuns also strongly recommended it when arranging her book shelves. However, besides these recommendations that I highly trust, what pushed me just that little further was also this novel’s content: sex and religion.
Going into a book because it has erotic content is oft rewarding: for if the erotica is arousing and goes well with the plot, then it is a hit, like Salwa Al Neimi’s book ‘The Proof of Honey’, but if it doesn’t then it’s an immediate flop, like Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’ or a more contemporary example, Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’. Sadly though, Quatro’s novel also fell in the latter camp for me.
‘Fire Sermon’, its name coming from Christianity’s spiritual and theological preaching of God, is about a deeply religious lady named Maggie, who after marrying Thomas at a very young age, later finds herself falling for Jamie, a poet. This whole novel is self-narrated from Maggie’s perspective, alternatively between her earlier times with Thomas and her on-going affair with Jamie.
As the couple are getting married, we hear Maggie telling us her thoughts of how rough their love-making has gotten or how Thomas was the person who took her virginity and hence she is marrying him. We hear also how Thomas’s childhood, marked with his parents’ traumatic upbringing of his, reflects his rather insecure, possessive, and aggressive behavior towards Maggie, who he now possesses to unconsciously repeat or renew his childhood experiences with. We also peak at Maggie’s submissive role towards Thomas’s unhealthy behaviors, mainly because she’s a good Christian - devout to keeping her marriage intact at the expense of suffering both sexually and emotionally.
Yet this all changes when Jamie enters the picture, with whom Maggie is having an affair as the novel opens. In Jamie, Maggie finds love making enjoyable, profound, transcendental, but she also feels contradicted by the affair because of her prudent, religious beliefs. Although her submissive position she pursues in bed with Jamie also, fucking with him revives the joys of sex which had gotten so dull with Thomas. And that revival is also because Maggie and Jamie are more like each other; their exchange of emails where they talk about Milton, the book ‘Bluets’, religion, God, poetry are a testament of their good time in bed. Eventually, we find Maggie in conversation with a therapist where she discusses this whole experience in order to make sense of it all.
While my more-than-usual talking about the book may beckon towards my liking of this book, the things I haven’t talked about were, sadly, more definitive for me in judging this book. The back-and-forth pattern of the novel between the past, present, emails, therapy, without any chapters, made for an irritating and hard-to-follow reading experience. And while Maggie and Thomas’s kids get born, grow up, and go to college, I hardly ever felt that the story has moved forward; it always felt stuck in one-place with the religio-sexual tensions. And while the sexual content was both honest and brave, true to how nasty sexual activities can get, the story around it, even with its links to religious beliefs, modern-day affair, and the psychological nuances of intense sex, did barely enough to keep this novel afloat.
For the most of it, Quatro’s ‘Fire Sermon’ felt empty; words conveying nothing in essence.
Ratings: 3/5
*** November 12, 2021_