A Penobscot novelist wonders what it means to be Native in ‘soulful’ family drama ‘Fire Exit’

Morgan Talty’s debut collection, “Night of the Living Rez,” thrilled critics and readers with its steely portrayals of Indigenous lives in and around Maine’s Penobscot reservation, blending gritty realism with gleams of hope and winning the National Book Critics Circle’s coveted Leonard Prize. His novel, “Fire Exit,” reveals a dexterity with the longer form and unflagging affection for his characters.

The late-middle-aged narrator, Charles Lamosway, resides in a bungalow across a river from the reservation. Most mornings he drinks coffee outside and watches his daughter, Elizabeth, as she leaves for work on the opposite shore.

Elizabeth has been raised in Native traditions, under the care of her mother Mary, and Mary’s husband, Roger, whom Elizabeth believes to be her biological father. After years of struggling with proximity to his only child, Charles has vowed to disclose his identity, tipping the plot into motion. Talty toggles gracefully between time streams: from 2017 to his protagonist’s adolescence in the 1970s to 1991, when Elizabeth’s birth and the death of Charles’ beloved stepfather, Fredrick, (in a moose-hunting accident) eerily coincided.

Charles befriends Bobby, a charming slacker he meets in AA. They dream up getaways, lured by the mirages of Florida and California, but Charles is tethered to his ailing mother, Louise, whose history of clinical depression and (later) dementia form the book’s heart-piercing throughline. Bobby pitches in.

Much of “Fire Exit’s” action revolves around Louise’s ECT appointments, where Charles encounters Mary and the adult Elizabeth, who is also seeking neurological treatment. When Charles divulges his plan, Mary recoils, terrified that the news would tilt the fragile young woman over the edge. Mary, we learn, will do anything to protect her daughter, even walling (or rivering) off her biological father.

Talty teases out themes familiar from “Living Rez”: the twinned scourges of poverty and booze; emotional warfare between generations; the quiet rage that pulses amid Indigenous communities; guns, guns and guns.

Although not technically a “skeejin” (blood-certified Native), Charles has strong opinions on race: “To think that the reservation is what makes an Indian an Indian is to massacre all over again the Natives who do not populate it. I could have grown up with my mother and Fredrick in a city, or in a country town, or, hell, in a dirty wet sewer, and I’d still feel this way..”

“Fire Exit” occasionally feels padded, slackening Talty’s pace, but his psychological lines remain taut as he moves toward a crescendo. There’s less social commentary than in his stories, more acute observation of his characters and their blinkered fates, shaped by seasons of heat and snow:

“Louise was waiting for me in the parking lot, looking up at the sky, which was no longer gray but a cloudless bright blue, and the sun at its zenith rayed down a sharp warmth, which would fade in the coming months as the sun distanced itself from us, when everything would whiten and gray and the life of the earth in these parts, except the pines, would wither and die, waiting to be brought back for the millionth or plus time.”

Soulful and assured, “Fire Exit” is the next step in an exciting, emerging career.

Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Fire Exit

By: Morgan Talty.

Publisher: Tin House, 256 pages $28.95.