FIRE EXIT

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.