The wanting to want, the insistent shoulder-tapping of desire-these things seized me in my mid-40s, and so I expected to be a sitting duck for Quatro’s all-in take on the theme.ĭ esirousness moves restlessly like a bird across the landscape of Maggie’s life-she has flirtations with, or crushes on, or inappropriate friendships with, a series of people. Fuller disclosure: Quatro and I hoe the same occasionally dolorous row of female midlife yearning. #Fire and desire jamie foxx show free fullFull disclosure: Quatro blurbed my recent memoir, Love and Trouble. “A boy and a girl in love, a wedding, a happily-ever-after.” And then what? Two children, two careers, a few moves, and a couple of decades later, the wife discovers that she wants-well, what, exactly? Maybe she just wants. “This story begins where others end,” Quatro writes. Maggie is a writer and a mother, raised as a strict Christian, who falls in love with a man who is not her husband. In Fire Sermon, Quatro places all her chips on that book-within-a-book. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “The stories about adultery make a book-within-a-book.” The stories exerted an urgent tug as I read-they created a beating, hot, weird heart at the center of the collection. Among other enticements, it featured a series of lambently honest, somewhat otherworldly treatments of adultery. I Want to Show You More, a collection of stories, was handsomely blurbed and ecstatically reviewed, and-perhaps most telling of all-was one of those books that get fervently passed from writer to writer. Those who have read Quatro’s first book will recognize the theme of desire. Her desire is what makes her human and also what connects her to something larger, something she insists on calling God. Maggie, the protagonist and intermittent narrator of Quatro’s new novel, Fire Sermon, wants to want. Buddhists, for instance, come out pretty firmly against it (desire, they say, is the root of suffering), and even atheists like me are susceptible to the wisdom of the Buddha. D esire gets a bad rap, and not just from prudes.
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