The Brooklyn Rail

“This is silly,” thinks Morgan Talty’s narrator, as he guns his pickup towards the climax of Fire Exit—and the man ought to trust his instincts. He’s heading into what looks like the worst blizzard of a hard Maine winter, a snow and cold that’s saturated the entire ferocious novel, and he hopes to find a young woman with a history of mental disorders. Most likely he’ll have to leave the truck soon, slogging on foot through the flakes “coming slanted and harder and faster.” Yet he’s neither EMT nor police, and he’s taking these extraordinary risks for someone he hardly knows. The missing woman may be his daughter Elizabeth, but even if she is, the two of them have never met.

In the opening pages of Fire Exit, we see the mother deny this man’s paternity. She’s a full-blooded Penobscot, this Mary, and she prefers another tribal member as the father of record. Her baby ought to be fully “enrolled,” and though Mary’s feelings for the narrator go back to childhood, they don’t change the fact that he’s only half Native. His father is white. This marginal status chills the protagonist more deeply than any winter storm, though as the novel opens, he and Mary are well into middle age and Elizabeth has grown up entirely without him.

Yet while this man can’t live on the reservation, he can’t quit it, either. His spartan home sits across the river, and since getting sober he spends much of his free time staring over into his former community. Fire Exit even provides a clarifying foil for his situation, a former bestie named Gizos. Gizos now lives in California, working in an office and married to a man. But the narrator was born to these woods and their ways. When an old tribal nemesis dies, he puts aside grudges to raise a Penobscot hymn: “kehee-da-mee-d’haa-da-moo-neh dun elee….” As for his name, Charles Lamosway, its French-Canadian lilt seems to shame him; only once does he speak it aloud, a long way into the text, when he’s trying to visit Elizabeth in the hospital following a depressive episode.

So, yes, “this is silly,” rushing off into awful weather after a woman who has no idea of their connection. And yet, as the desperate search gets underway, Charles concludes, “that has been my life: a pursuit of only remains.”

Morgan Talty has picked over those remains before, in his highly praised 2022 debut, the linked short stories Night of the Living Rez. The Native lands in question are the same as in the novel, the Penobscot, and other elements recur as well. In both books, dead forest creatures seem to curse the local humans, and strained family relations result from real-world curses afflicting many Indigenous communities, like addiction and depression. Both fictions check their mothers into mental wards, and since Charles’s mother is grandmother to Elizabeth, it’s impossible to overlook the inheritance. As Mary puts it, during a rare visit with Charles that kicks the narrative into higher gear: “The doctor asked if there was anybody else in our family that suffered from depression. I felt like saying, ‘We’re Indians, of course it runs in our family….’”

The speaker may not be the narrator, in this case, but the tone is his: down to earth, though by no means a country bumpkin. Talty composes in plainsong, and though he peppers it with irony, with insight, he eschews the special effects we see in other celebrated recent novels from Native Americans. Brandon Hobson, for instance, works with surreal landscapes, and Tommy Orange with the contorted perception of his protagonist’s “Drome” (from fetal alcohol syndrome). Talty, alternatively, recalls classic realism of the outdoors, à la Nick Adams up in Michigan. Such writing also allows, now and again, a brief rhetorical rise, illuminating acres of wilderness:

I realized [my mother] was light—so light, like … how I imagine the weight of a star to be, just the dot of it in the dark sky, in the middle of your palm—and I picked her up and carried her out the door and to the truck, and I almost dropped her in the snow but I didn’t because the fierceness with which we love gave me enough strength.

Yet while I admire how this author harnesses the abiding power of homely old metaphors like “star,” what most impresses me about his first novel is its tightly interlocking dramatic structure. The opening passage, just two pages, engages the primary plot driver, the narrator’s decision that his daughter finally “know the truth.” The next chapters swiftly map the pressure points of Charles, Mary, Elizabeth, and the addled grandmother, and thereafter, every jab to each delivers a jolt of suspense or engagement. Meanwhile, secondary players like Gizos and the narrator’s friend Bobby complicate and deepen the material. Bobby, a serious drinker and often comic relief, nonetheless reinforces the narrator’s commitment about his sobriety and, in forging a friendship with Charles’s mother, challenges the narrator to expand “the fierceness with which we love.” Such emotional growth, better yet, in no way detracts from the sheer thrills of crashing around, in the closing chapters, through the storm. This isn’t recliner reading.

As exciting as I found Fire Exit, its fresh take on family secrets and backwoods Americana, ultimately it had me thinking about a social issue, even political. I don’t mean the obvious, the depredations of white colonialism. Those historic evils come up of course, for instance between Mary and the doctor—but the present tragedy arises from ill will among his own community. The exclusion Charles suffers, indeed all the loneliness that afflicts him, has its roots in his exclusion from the Penobscot community. Of course, this fear of the Other owes much to white oppression, but that’s not what drove Gizos out West. Rather, he fled his own gay-bashing family and schoolmates. Charles takes similar hits, throughout, some subtle and some bruising, and so his novel amounts to a shamanic exhortation, in deep midwinter, that the people kindle up something brighter and warmer.