There’s a lovely clarity to Morgan Talty’s debut novel, “Fire Exit.” He is especially bracing about the losses that can accrue with time. When we first meet Charles Lamosway, Talty’s middle-aged protagonist, he is at a crossroads: Mental illness and dementia threaten to engulf his mother; he has been evicted from the Native reservation where he has lived all his life; and, most painful of all, his daughter doesn’t know him. That last problem, at least, is within his power to change. He strongly feels “she needed to know that her blood was her blood,” to be aware of her “connection to a past time and people.”
Like Talty’s 2022 story collection, “Night of the Living Rez,” this novel does not shy away from blistering questions of belonging and identity, but rather leans into them, in taut, often precise prose. What, exactly, does it mean to have ties to a community, but remain an outsider? What belonging can we claim for ourselves? Who gets to decide what we are? Such questions will become matters of life and death for Charles, when things eventually come to a head in the novel’s startling climax.
Charles is white by blood, but Penobscot by culture, having been raised on the tribe’s reservation by a white mother and a Penobscot stepfather. After the passing of the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, in 1980, he — being white, and not having married into the tribe — is asked to leave. He finds himself living across the river, in full view of what he has lost.
It’s a calculated choice. He has a grown daughter, Elizabeth, with a Penobscot woman named Mary. She’d left Charles after learning she was pregnant. In the hopes that the baby would grow up connected to her culture, and qualify for tribal enrollment, Mary had insisted that she and Charles lie, telling Elizabeth that her Penobscot stepfather is her biological father. And so, Elizabeth is raised on the reservation without any knowledge of Charles, believing herself to be fully Indigenous. Charles wants to give his daughter the gift of knowing her true heritage. But as he’s about to learn, forcing unwanted awareness on a vulnerable person can be a disastrous act.
Though Talty’s subject matter is often dark — exploring alcoholism, abandonment, physical violence, emotional abuse — he has a light touch, and draws us in with a calm intimacy. There is much to admire. In one piercing scene, Charles visits a friend’s violent father in the hospital, observing: “I could see the veins lining his skin … and I could not — and I still cannot — help but feel sorry for him, even though I disliked him the most out of anybody I had met in my life.”
As with any first novel, there are occasional overreaches. Sometimes the language is stretched beyond clarity: “Since that day I’ve never seen a boy, or a man, cry that hard. Now I know such a thing could do the world good, not the crying, not simply the body and spirit’s self-recognition of pain, but the publicness of it, the body and spirit’s communicating to another’s body and spirit in one and only one language — that of deep, deep emotion — between the flesh of two free bodies.”
On the flip side, blood metaphors are sometimes not stretched far enough: “Blood matters only enough to keep us alive,” Charles concludes in one scene. “Blood is messy, and it stains in ways that are hard to clean, especially if that stain can’t be seen but we know it is there, a trail of red or dark red leading back to a time we cannot go to remove it.” Such musings lack the nuance of the wiser passages.
For all its grandness, “Fire Exit” sometimes feels more like a collection of linked stories than a self-contained novel. Occasionally, the connective tissue is missing, and the chapters feel discrete, without the cumulative reasoning of a larger narrative. This mostly works, reflecting the texture of Charles’s chaotic days, but sometimes we’re left wondering about events or characters whose fates are later glanced over or dropped.
But this does nothing to dim the novel’s innate strengths. Talty writes with an awareness that capital “C” culture can be both all-defining in life and also a mere detail. Yes, we can feel deeply connected to a group, but that tie isn’t going to fend off life’s tumults. His greatest skill is in describing the simple pleasures that sustain us, like the “silence emitted during the dark of night,” or “the river’s flow and the summer breeze rippling hard-to-see leaves,” or the comfort of not coffee itself but “just the warm mug in my cupped hands.”
These are the small negotiations we make with the world, and they can sometimes accumulate more weight than the most earth-shattering revelations. It is we who get to decide what will matter to us most, to choose what will become part of our story.
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