Carnality and spirit run against each other

The Christians that inspire Jamie Quatro’s debut collection of short stories – set in the modern day Georgia-Tennessee border town would expect final option  if lost in desert and turning to prayer many believers expect to be ignored and turned into stone.

Quatro’s hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South, exposing the theological complexities, fractured marriages and mercurial temptations.

The characters bare their own notions of god, illicit sex, raising children and running and a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse in their bed, marathon runners on a Civil war battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens, a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests and husband asks his wife to show him show she would make love to another man.

 The only thing as all-consuming is sex, though more often the idea than the thing itself. Women often struggle with their consciences and unconsummated affair, often done by email or phone torn between what they feel want and what they believe, as Christians, they should want.

When one woman’s paramour dies, she thinks god or taking ways “the burden of sin” because “it is the right thing to say”.

Salvation for those who fail to live up to the standards of their religion, lies in the flesh of those just as tarnished as themselves. When a church widow is smashed in demolition the congregation ends up taking the whole building down and forming a nudist cult.

 

I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro, Picador £12.99, 206 pages.