In Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit, Charles is caught between cultures and generations. Raised on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation by his depressive mother and Native American step-father, he no longer has any claim on residency there. Laws around rights are determined by dehumanising measures of blood quantum, and so the bureaucracy – not the community – leaves Charles exiled from his childhood home once his step-father dies.
So, he looks on, from his house across the river. He is interested in the community he was forced to leave behind, but also in his biological daughter, Elizabeth. His claim to being her father was likewise dropped. Because the people listed as Elizabeth’s parents on her birth certificate are both Penobscot, the lie allows her to remain part of their tribe.
Charles leads a quiet life in the desolate cold. He drinks coffee, smokes and watches the sunrise as an eternal insomniac. He moves between his mother, Louise (who, when her memory isn’t failing, sinks into despair), his one friend and occasional encounters with Elizabeth and her mother. In the darkness, he realises that Elizabeth must know the truth of who she is. “There’s more history that belongs to you than you know.”
The slow and meandering pace of the novel feels appropriate for the pace of the imperfect, but likeable protagonist’s life. Yet, the prose is often poetically truncated, even terse at times. The form and flow of the novel creatively mixes hard and soft, care and strength.
Read: Book review: The Crimson Road, A G Slatter
Fire Exit reckons with identity, responsibility, history and story. There’s a desolate sense of plodding exhaustion as Charles moves through his world – the heavy baggage of a traumatic past and unmoving dread for the future. But the darkness is speckled by a well-earned hope for new connections to grow.
Fire Exit, Morgan Talty
Publisher: Scribe
ISBN: 9781761381522
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256pp
Publication: 4 February 2025
RRP: $32.99
