Fire Exit

January 1, 2024

Talty makes his full-length fiction debut after winning multiple awards for his story collection Night of the Living Rez. On the Penobscot Reservation in Maine, Charles can only watch as his daughter Elizabeth grows up without knowing he is her father. After she is gone for weeks, he considers confessing his secret. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2024
Talty's tender and heartbreaking debut novel (following his short-story collection, Night of the Living Rez, 2022) follows unhappy, middle-aged Charles Lamosway, who keeps one eye on his mother, depressed all her life and now afflicted by dementia, and the other on his equally depressed daughter, Elizabeth, who doesn't know Charles is her father. He lives in Maine, across the river from the Penobscot Nation--where he was raised by a Native stepfather--and from which, lacking blood ties, he is now exiled. Charles can see the house where his daughter was raised by a mother determined to conceal the fact that Elizabeth doesn't have the percentage of Native heritage necessary to be enrolled in the Nation. Going to AA meetings, hanging out with his alcoholic friend Bobby, and shepherding his mother to electroshock appointments, Charles observes his small community with a keen sense of irony and, in spite of himself, begins to consider the past he has deliberately repressed. When he determines to reveal his identity to Elizabeth, the consequences reshape lives on both sides of the river. A wrenching story of dislocation and regret, sweetened with touches of humor, the novel raises important questions about human connection and belonging.

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May 1, 2024
Regrets burden a life. Charles Lamosway, the protagonist of Talty's debut novel, is a man haunted by guilt and shame. Though he was raised by his white mother and Native American stepfather on Maine's Penobscot Reservation, he had to leave at age 18. Now in his late 50s, he lives across the river from his former home. From there, he can observe the house where Elizabeth, the daughter he fathered out of wedlock, was raised by her mother, Mary, and the Native man she thought was her father. He ruminates about the single contact he had with Elizabeth, lasting only a few minutes, when she was 3 years old, as well as the inadvertent role he played in the events leading up to the death of his stepfather, Fredrick. He's burdened and aggravated by his mother Louise's slide into dementia, the recurrence of her persistent depression, and his memory of a painful incident that took place on the reservation when he was a teenager. In this deliberately paced, moody novel, Talty, himself a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, considers questions of identity, as Charles observes that "I knew and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong" and acknowledges that his acquiescence in Mary's decision to raise their daughter on the reservation "goes deeper than blood." But the author's principal concern lies with how past events in his characters' lives resonate painfully in the present. As Charles, who'd been estranged from his mother for several years before entering Alcoholics Anonymous, now reluctantly becomes responsible for her well-being, his desire to reconnect with Elizabeth, regardless of the consequences, only intensifies until it climaxes on the night of a swirling nor'easter. As Charles says, "We are made of stories, and if we don't know them--the ones that make us--how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?" A melancholy journey through one man's damaged past.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 27, 2024
Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with a moving if muted novel about a middle-aged white man yearning to tell his birth daughter, who was raised on the Penobscot Reservation, that he’s her father. Charles Lamosway grew up on the reservation, too, and lived there until 1983, when he turned 18 and had to leave because he had no blood ties to the tribe. His mother, Louise, was allowed to remain on the reservation with his Penobscot stepfather, who helped Charles build a house across the river, where he slipped into alcoholism. In 1991, Charles unexpectedly had a daughter with his Penobscot friend Mary. After she married a Penobscot man named Roger, the couple and Charles agreed to put Roger’s name on the birth certificate, so the girl, Elizabeth, could be a citizen of the tribe. Now, Charles, who’s been sober for more than 20 years, wonders if revealing the truth to Elizabeth might enrich her life and his own. The central tension—will Charles tell Elizabeth or won’t he—is set up early and doesn’t fully develop, but there are plenty of touching moments, such as a brief meeting between Charles and Elizabeth before she’s old enough to remember. This has the humanity of Talty’s promising debut, but it doesn’t quite reach the same heights. Agent: Rebecca Friedman, Rebecca Friedman Literary.

June 21, 2024

Talty's debut, Night of the Living, was billed as a short story collection but can easily be read as a novel-in-stories. His latest is more identifiable as a straightforward novel, collapsing the structural precariousness of that previous work to mixed effect. The narrative centers on Charles, a middle-aged white man raised on and still residing near the Penobscot Reservation, who is dealing with his mother's descent into dementia and his increasing desire to reveal himself to a now-adult daughter who doesn't know him. At its core, the novel is concerned with the ways people are haunted by pasts both lived and inherited and the endless complex negotiations between parents and children. Talty savvily conceives of his narrative in the grand midcentury tradition of depicting suburban roil, wherein placid surfaces of the domestic and quotidian build to existential crescendo, and the result does prove potent in spurts. But in execution, the sum of the languorous plotting, which moves around in time and sifts through Charles's interiority, is a novel that occasionally feels absent of meaningful incident and psychological heft, too reliant on homogenous, heavy-handed themes and narrative parallelizing to land with its intended power. VERDICT This novel further testifies to Talty's ability as a formal craftsman, but its overdependence on narrative and emotional loops leaves the short novel feeling surprisingly padded.--Luke Gorham

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.