FIRE EXIT, by Morgan Talty
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.
