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A few months back for Native American Heritage Month, my library had a list of recommended books by Native authors, so I added a few of those to my TBR. This week I finished the second one, Fire Exit by Morgan Talty. (The first was Bad Cree by Jessica Johns, but I did not get around to writing a review for that.) 

 

Fire Exit is a family-focused story. The protagonist, Charles, is not Native, but was raised on the Penobscot reservation in Maine by his Penobscot stepfather, Frederick. When Charles comes of age, he's required to move off the reservation, but he stays nearby, just across the river. As a young man he fathers a child with a Penobscot woman, who chooses to leave him and claim another man—a Penobscot—as the father. Now later in life, Charles is wrestling with whether or not the child, now an adult, is owed the truth of her parentage. 

 

The storyline is not complicated, but this is not a light book. This is a book full of unhappy people struggling to do their best and overcome their pasts. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don't, but it all comes off realistic. 

 

Charles' relationship with his child—Elizabeth--parallels well with his relationship with each of his own parents. Both Charles and Elizabeth were fathered by non-Native men who were never a part of their lives. Both had a Penobscot stepfather who by all accounts did a wonderful job raising them, and whom they consider their true father. The difference is that Charles is aware of his family's truth, while Elizabeth has been purposefully kept ignorant. 

 

As Charles ponders whether or not he should tell Elizabeth the truth against the wishes of her mother, Mary, he is also seeking to reconnect with his own mother, Louise, a woman in the early stages of dementia. In his relationships with both women, Charles is hampered by the past and often wonders if it's ever possible to overcome.

 

That is also a theme that repeats throughout the book: all of these characters are weighed down by their pasts to various degrees. I've seen other reviews describe the novel as "meandering" and "ponderous" and I would agree. It doesn't proceed in a linear fashion but is mixed throughout with Charles' recollections of past events, usually woven in with how he views them as influencing the present. Much of the novel is introspective; there's not a lot of action, and Charles is not an especially decisive person. He often feels very passive, which felt realistic to me for the sort of person he seems to be, but may be grating to other readers. 

 

It eschews any notion of therapy-speak, which was a relief, and characters often felt believably cagey about their feelings and motivations, or even that they didn't fully understand themselves. It makes for a juicy kind of messiness among them, and a grayness to the whole thing which I enjoyed. For instance, when Charles' friend Bobby—who has been begging Charles to move away from Maine with him—tours a house in Florida, he returns claiming it's an absolute no-go. Charles accuses him of lying about the reasons why, but the book never tells us if Bobby was lying or not, and if he was, why, and what really happened. Like Charles, we can only take Bobby's word with the sneaking suspicion it's not the real story.

 

Charles' efforts to reconcile with Louise and Elizabeth hit similar roadblocks, and I enjoyed what I felt was the realistic awkwardness with which these played out.

 

The prose is blunt and unadorned, which suits Charles' first-person narration, although at times I did get a bit worn out of Talty's penchant for running through mundane details ("I went to the sink. I set my bowl down. I turned on the water and rinsed the bowl out." etc.) However, on the whole, I thought the prose fit the story and it can be poignant in its simplicity.

 

It's not a very long book (8 hours on audiobook) and I enjoyed it. The ending felt appropriate, and on a hopeful note, one can believe there is some element of Charles and Elizabeth laying the past to rest in these final chapters.