Fire Sermon begins with a wedding on the Malibu coast from which the bride, Maggie, can see the stars. A young girl with evangelical parents who whisper to her with gratitude, Maggie tells us that her wedding is about boy and a girl in love who intend to live a "happily ever after life." Maggie also talks of a fellowship and stipends and moving to Princeton. Thomas, her fiancé, will work in Manhattan. For Maggie's parents, at least, this is a moment of great honor and pride, a particular badge of honor. Maggie's quiet naivete about love and marriage beats at the heart of Fire Sermon, Quatro's loose contemporary and poetic homily on the intersection of sex and faith.

"How foolish we were, I tell myself now," says Maggie as she looks back on her life. She tells us about her affair with James, a talented poet and academic whom she first met in person in July 2014 at a conference in Nashville. They stayed in touch, writing to each other for a year. There's amusement on the surface, admiration and a kind of ease that something was already understood between them: "we belong to one another." Maggie remembers the time on the elevator, James beside her, and the secret of what two of them did together. On the first day at a conference in Chicago, the couple are still trying to pretend as, in desperate abandon, they make their way to the Hyatt Hotel. In the backseat of the cab, James's fingers barely touch the edge of Maggie's thigh, taut in her pencil skirt.

Quatro's ethereal writing is reminiscent of James Salter, a purposeful objectivity that conveys Maggie's singular detachment. Startling ironies hint at Maggie's sexually dead marriage, a relationship that is soon heaped in a corner and bleeds out onto the pages. This prose creates a vivid depth of feeling and fresh rigor of momentum. Maggie is a scholarly woman, a student of religion who likes to write poetry, yet she's never quite able to rise above her personal despair and emptiness. She is a shadow of herself as she holds up a mirror of the dereliction that lives within her in Nashville, the city where she and Thomas build a life together.

The pain of Maggie's love for James is like a physical chink in her soul each time she allows James to metaphorically penetrate her. Maggie has been brought up to believe that it is an enriching thing to satisfy Thomas, who is a good man and good father to their two children, Kate and Tommy. Yet Maggie--uncertain of what awaits her--wants to hide her secret as she experiences her share of heartache and regret one makes during times of great community strength and courage.

Through Maggie's eyes, we observe a dissection of what it means to be poised between "a platonic past and carnal future." She's frustrated that she has only one life that she's actually lived. And she's plagued by the consummated moment with James that "bloom across her body, slide into memory, and fade into forgetting." Maggie is balanced on this precipice, just one more fission fueled by lust and loneliness. She needs to tap into creative energy as the buzz from James fuels her art and the rest of her life. Maggie is aware both of James's physical presence and that whatever was between them is dangerous and real but needed to end: "I only know arousal within love--because I've never separated emotion from body--is my pattern to pretend love first, over and over, in order to feel desire?"

The book is beautiful and poetic, and Quatro makes good use of Maggie's most poignant moments, although some readers might feel that her passion for James gets lost in her endless theological overlay. At least a third of the novel revolves around emails between Maggie and James. Yet sadly, even though Maggie tells us repeatedly of her love for him, James's own emotional texture is muddled. So it is with Thomas, whom Maggie ends up blaming for effectively shutting the door on the possibility that she will ever find another, more honest kind of love.