Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
“There was this history I was a part of, a history my body had experienced and moved through, but I never knew it. It made me wonder how much I didn’t know. We had that in common Elizabeth and I. And I felt she should know her body was special, and she should know its history, especially the one it would not tell her and that she could not see.”
Fire Exit (2025, Scribe) is the debut novel from Morgan Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation. His previous short story collection, Night of the Living Rez (2022), won several accolades including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize. Fire Exit builds on Talty’s impressive ability to draw compelling narratives through clean dialogue and believable characters.
Our narrator is Charles, a middle-aged man who sits on the periphery of life. Charles never knew his biological father but lived most of his childhood with his white mother Louise and Native stepfather Frederick on the Penobscot reserve. On turning eighteen, he is no longer deemed a child and therefore required to leave the reserve. Frederick, with Charles’ help, builds him a house just on the other side of the river from the reserve and his childhood home.
“As soon as it was built, Frederick signed the land over to me, and for a number of years until he died, I gave him as much money as I could spare to help pay for what he’d put into this place, what he’d given me… he always tried not to take the money, always said this is what fathers are supposed to do.”
When Charles’ Penobscot girlfriend Mary falls pregnant she leaves him, deciding instead to raise his daughter with another Penobscot man so that she can be given tribal membership, leaving Charles to watch the life they have together from his solitary place on the outside:
“In the days after I saw Elizabeth, when I learned her mother would never again bring her to my road, I got thinking about the word ‘dirt’. Maybe it was the memory of her little feet touching the ground that brought the word to my attention. This is embarrassing or maybe the better word is dramatic. I was upset. And drunk.”
We meet Charles some twenty or so years after these events as he reminisces about his childhood and the relationships and events that have shaped him. His mother Louise is battling the creep of dementia alongside a long undiagnosed depressive disorder, and her disordered memory of Charles pushes him into a deeper need to feel seen and acknowledged for who he really is. He has watched his daughter Elizabeth be raised by another man and observing her moving back to the family home as a young adult he surmises that much like his own mother, Elizabeth is battling her own demons. He decides it’s time for her to know the truth:
“We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them – the ones that make us – how can we ever be fully realised? How can we ever be who we really are?”
Despite the drastic consequences for Elizabeth on potentially learning this information, we can’t help rooting for Charles. He is riddled with guilt over the events that led to the death of Frederick and his complicated connection to the reserve sees him consistently seeking to do what he hopes is the ‘right’ thing.
For most of the book, not much happens and in the final third there is a lot of repetition with Charles moving between caring for Louise in her apartment, taking her for treatments and revisiting the same memories. Some of this could have perhaps been condensed so we are pulled towards what should feel like a more urgent and dramatic sequence of events that leads to the final conclusion, but Talty also shines in his descriptions of seemingly simple actions. His beats are on point as characters move around the confines of their immediate environment, and I loved his use of the weather and transitions between day and night to create a sense of claustrophobia. Talty pulls us in tightly as we are kept wondering ‘will-he-won’t-he’ over Charles revealing the truth to Elizabeth.
“Maybe I was blinded by my experience, by my own suffering, by my deepest desire – that she know I exist, that she know we were part of a story or a history that very much mattered, not in some grand scheme of things but in a simple way concerning our spirit.”
Talty has shared that he wanted to explore the “weird situations federal Indian law has created for Indigenous people” through Charles’ experience and he writes from his own lived experience: his wife isn’t Native so their child cannot be enrolled in the tribe. It’s this personal mixed with the ambiguous questions that these situations raise that make Fire Exit so quietly affecting to read.
While Talty doesn’t leave us with an easy resolution or clear outcome for Charles and Elizabeth, there’s still humour in these pages (mostly from Charles’ drunken friend Bobby and Louise’s kooky neighbour) and a healthy dose of hope. Fire Exit brings to light a nuanced and important story with endearing, complex characters that will definitely stay with you.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
