I Want to Show You More: Jamie Quatro

"Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humor, Jamie Quatro's publishing debut is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family.

"Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro's seamless weave of hypnotic stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they reveal lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the new American South.  These fifteen linked tales present readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations.  Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her extramarital affair while she and others lay bare their notions of God, sex, raising children, and running:  a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover's corpse in their bed; a girl's embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.

"Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want to Show You More marks the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction."

It just so happens that I wrote a book review for this collection of short stories for my "Writing Fiction:  Unlikable Characters" class:

Will Gladly Accept “More” from Quatro

            Jamie Quatro’s collection of short stories in “I Want to Show You More” have the noteworthy ability to draw readers in with their personal, intimate tones; their often dark and extremely human characters and situations; and her enthralling sense of place.  Most unique, perhaps, is Quatro’s ability to subtly weave together her characters and individual stories in the collection.  One can read each story individually and lose no enjoyment, but a new level is achieved when reading it as a collection.  The reader recognize names and places from previous stories and makes fascinating connections that only add a new layer to the book as a whole.  A great deal of the stories deal with death—often as a result of cancer, questioning one’s religion, issues with fidelity, running (rather, the themes of dedication, perseverance, and struggle associated with the activity) and life in and around Lookout Mountain, Georgia/Tennessee—a place that seems to personify the tumultuous state of its residence, who, as portrayed in the story, are in constant states of flux and identity struggles.

            Refreshingly, Quatro is unafraid to discuss often taboo subjects like adultery, which she did in “Decomposition:  A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives,” where the main character’s affair with another man produces a metaphorical corpse—a grotesquely descriptive manifestation of the emotions resulting from the relationship—around which she and her husband must learn to live their lives.  As the body decays, she has to learn to cope with life after the affair—the decomposition cleverly mirrors the “stages of grief” taught in every Introduction to Psychology course.  This story itself is uniquely structured.  Quatro creates a clinical tone to the story through her use of medical terms for the actual physical decomposition of the corpse (i.e. the section titled, “Algor Mortis:  early postmortem stage in which the body gradually loses heat to the ambient environment,” is used to personify the initial break off of the affair (Quatro 5)), which balances out the often stomach-churning descriptions and prevents them from trending toward gratuitous.  Most readers can only take so many descriptions of “viscous black fluid ooz[ing] from the corner of the [corpse’s] mouth” (13). 

Similarly taboo, “Georgia the Whole Time” deals with the issue of living with a cancer diagnosis in another clever parallel.  The main character and her family move to Lookout Mountain, Georgia for her husband’s job, but the location quickly becomes a benefit for her cancer treatments.  As she is forced to get used to the oddities of the town—how people reorganize the rooms in their homes to have cheaper taxes thanks to the state line that runs through the town, the leash laws, the way there seems to be a constant undercurrent of battle (the resonating echoes from the Civil War)—Quatro uses these as an interesting medium to convey the character’s struggle to cope and regain her footing after her diagnosis in a very non-cliché and unexpected manner.

“Here” is the sequel to “Georgia the Whole Time”—told from the husband’s point of view—even though it is located first in the book.  It deals similarly with cancer, but with the wake it leaves in the aftermath of death.  Quatro bluntly—yet rather eloquently—approaches the grief and struggles of a man who lost his wife and watched her waste away.  He has to rediscover his role now that he is left alone to care for their children.  When he finally realizes that his children need him (because he is a self-professed “needy one” (51)) Neil allows himself to realize how he should have been cherishing his time with them and fully realized his place in their lives—his identity.

A similar rediscovery of one’s self takes place in “Better to Lose an Eye,” where a young girl tries to cope with her warring emotions concerning her quadriplegic mother.  Quatro’s way of handling complex, confusing inner conflict is moving and relatable.  It brings her characters to life in a short span of writing.  It takes Lindsey most of the story to realize that she does, indeed, love her helpless mother, but when she does, the scene is supremely touching.  Quatro writes, “She loved her, loved her desperately; she would sit with her, facing her, her back to the party, to the world.  She would hold Mama’s crumpled hands, she would kiss them, she didn’t care who saw.  They would sit together, the two of them, with only the blue sky and clouds drifting overhead.  They would sit there until God had mercy and turned them both to stone” (118).

Quatro’s approach to these stories—these characters who live in this unique town straddling the Tennessee-Georgia line—is captivating.  Personally, I have never read any other author to whom I can compare her writing.  Several of the stories were told in a similar tone and perspective to Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be the Other Woman” in the sense that they really draw the reader in through use of a particular perspective—the use of “you” helps the reader to put him- or herself into the life of the main character.  “Decomposition” contains this perspective as well as the issue of adultery, while “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” sucks the reader into a twisted world where running—struggling through life with unfair burdens—takes on a whole new meaning.

However, a couple of the stories seemed lumped in simply because they take place in the Lookout Mountain, Georgia/Tennessee area.  Even though I found “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” to be extremely complex and interesting, its oddities did not quite seem to fit with the rest of the collection.  The only strings tying it with the other stories were the theme of running and the setting.  Something similar happened with “1.7 to Tennessee.”  The story—about a determined elderly woman on a mission—was only really connected to the others by (again) the setting, and a very brief mention of some characters that are in a few of the other passages.  The tenuous connections here mess with the flow of the work as a whole, though they make interesting individual works.

Overall, Quatro’s collection was captivating.  The tales were beautifully tragic in their oft-sad plots, and the settings were rich and enhanced every aspect of her stories.

I suppose I cheated on this review by having one already prepared...  I would like to add (in my own "normal" review voice as opposed to my "scholarly" one) that I did enjoy the collection for the most part.  Some of the stories seemed a bit too "out there" and contrasted too sharply to the harsh, unadulterated reality of the rest of the stories.  My favorite aspect was probably the fact that the stories worked both as a whole and as individual pieces -- a mark of, I feel, brilliant talent.  Quatro's characters were rich and fascinating.  I loved how unafraid she was to address things that many authors stay away from.  She wasn't afraid to write about adulterous women and needy men and people who find themselves in periods of questioning their beliefs.  She had many characters that could be deemed "unlikable," but what makes them so fascinating is the fact that, even though they are supremely flawed by things like moral standards, we readers cannot help but find things in them that are captivating.  It's difficult to not want to read more.

I recommend this collection of short stories to those readers who are not afraid to test boundaries, think outside of the box, and look for a meaning deeper than the words they are reading.