A mystery of identity, family and a river keep the reader rapt throughout Morgan Talty ’16’s debut novel, “Fire Exit.”
The book follows a white man named Charles Lamosway, who was raised on a Native American reservation but evicted as an adult because he is not fully Penobscot by blood. From his back porch, Lamosway obsessively watches his daughter, Elizabeth, grow up on the reservation across the river. There, she is raised by a Penobscot couple, unaware of Charles’s existence. He lives a lonely life, taking care of his ailing mother, Louise.
The complicated constellation of relationships and history is difficult to put together at first, but purposefully so. To understand the basic premise of the novel, Talty whispers information to the reader like secrets. The story’s slow pace feels more like a mystery than traditional fiction novels because of how deliberately Talty reveals more.
The spellbinding clarity of the sentences reminded me of Emma Cline’s recent novel, “The Guest,” about a call girl who takes advantage of hospitality in the vacation homes of the New York elite. Both have a straightforwardness and wit in their descriptions that feels very contemporary.
At times, however, I felt distracted by the amount of trauma in the novel. Charles’s mother suffers from severe depression and dementia, and ultimately dies. His best friend, Bobby, tries — and fails — to cope with alcoholism. Charles’s childhood best friend, Gizos, is physically abused by his father for being gay. Charles’s stepfather, who he deeply loves, goes missing in the night on a hunting trip and freezes to death. I could go on.
Of course, Charles’s history is important to understanding all that he feels he has lost. However, I often forgot about the crux of the novel: Charles’s relationship with Elizabeth. My heart was still wrapped up in his broken relationship with his mother, with his biological father and with Gizos. I was still thinking about the loss of his stepfather and the pain of being evicted from the reservation. I felt almost unmoved when Charles finally meets his daughter and she burns down his house. It was difficult to care — or, to care as much as I feel I should have — about the climax.
Still, Talty’s prose is stirring, especially his descriptions of the natural environment. When Elizabeth joins Charles in burying his mother, Talty connects the theme of blood heritage to our shared connection with the earth: “The wind blew and rippled the trees, their pale green underbellies showing,” Talty writes. “I thought I was alone then, just me and my mother, but before I could pull the last bit of dirt that was there, Louise’s granddaughter told me to move, and she got on her hands and knees and with her arm she pushed the rest of the earth, our sweet, shared earth, over our shared blood that was now turned to ash.”
Similar imagery of dirt and earth runs through the entire novel. In this way, "Fire Exit" mirrors Talty’s acclaimed 2022 story collection, “Night of the Living Rez,” which is rife with natural decay. In one story, thousands of caterpillars carpet a highway until “the road boiled.” In another, a turtle rots until the smell expands to fill a house.
These kinds of descriptions bring the reader into Charles’s mind. The reader feels as if the dirt is slipping through their palm, as though they are trudging through dunes of snow in search of their daughter. I’m excited to read more from him in the coming years — and surmise that his time in the Upper Valley must have deepened his connection to the natural world.
Rating: ★★★★
