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Making lemonade out of a lemon life sounds like a pretty good alternative when life hands you a pile of rubble instead, and Charles could probably use a glass since he’s had to battle sobriety for 22 years now. Fire Exit, the debut novel from Morgan Talty who awed critics and readers alike with his short story collection Night of the Living Rez, interrogates personal history caught in the teeth of governmental gears where heritage and identity are questions of paperwork and lived experiences are subjected to the erasure of time and failing memory. It is a sobering story of swallowing guilt and regret that would melt under its own melancholia were it not for Talty’s ability to make each scene so direct and gut wrenching as if the prose were being drug through the shattered glass of the American dream. ��I knew and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong,�� Talty’s narrator states, and this dichotomy is something Charles will grapple with as we watch the slow burn deterioration of his life lead up to a decision to tell his daughter the truth about her past while also watching the deterioration of his own mother to dementia, taking the untold stories of his life along with her. Fiercely moving and heartbreaking, Fire Exit is an empathetic look at navigating the labyrinthian mazes of genetics and grief in a country that would just as soon wipe the whole of indigenous peoples under the rug.

��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?��

Set around the Penobscot Reservation in Maine, the site of Talty’s own childhood upbringing, and delves deep into the opaqueness of federal laws surrounding reservation requirements and jurisdiction. As he told , the novel was conceived while wrestling with fellow indigenous author Louise Erdrich’s own interrogation of Federal Laws as he read her National Book Award winning novel The Round House. Talty says:

��Federal Indian Law makes no sense. None. And so in reading her novel—in seeing how Erdrich looked at the law—I wondered, what is a situation that could arise out of the nonsensical structure holding up Indian Country? Blood quantum jumped into my head and that was the genesis.��

—a rather controversial measurement put into law by 18th century white colonial settlers to determine the amount of indigenous blood a person possesses—reduces identity to a percentage in order to restrict who can belong to a tribe or live on a reservation and how that passes along to children. And while Charles makes frequent variations on the refrain of ��all blood looks the same,�� blood is the dilemma assailing Charles�� entire life. Able to live on the reservation as a child due to his step-father, Fredrick, Charles loses his claim to heritage at the moment of Fredrick’s shocking death. Yet now in the present Charles is forced to watch his daughter, Elizabeth, from across the river where she lives in the reservation, her mother having married another man and claiming the child as his in order to secure enough of a claim to blood in order to stay there.

��I wanted her to know who I was—who I really was—instead of a white man who lived across from her all her life and watched her grow up from this side of the river.��

The novel is two-fold. One is Charles�� moral conundrum over whether or not he tell Elizabeth the truth against the wishes of her mother. This is less about meeting his daughter, or so he claims, and more about giving her a key to her past.

��All I wanted was that she know the history that was hers, that this history wasn’t lost or wasted because of the illusion we’d tried to live in so neatly, that there was a life she could have lived and been a part of, and that she know she was as much a part of me as she was not.��

The other issue is that his mother is quickly losing herself to dementia, and not only is the time running out to tell Elizabeth her history, but also to learn his own as she begins to forget who he is beyond her caregiver. Private history sometimes tumbles out his mother’s mouth, but more frequently it slides off the cliffs of memory and into oblivion. Interestingly enough I have recently just read another novel about a man considering his estranged daughter named Elisabeth (Ali Smith’s Spring) and a novel about history washed away by the loss of memory (Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers). Talty’s combination of the two themes really hit hard and heartbreakingly so as he manages to give each the attention they deserve as a fully realized part of the novel while also functional commentary on one another through their juxtapositions and parallels. There are many, with births and deaths juxtaposed, or dementia and depression paralleled in the shared horrific treatment, and while, admittedly, the constant use of parallels feels a bit contrived at times in order to land a larger emotional blow, the effect is so shattering that it hardly matters.

��There was this history I was a part of. A history my body had experienced and moved though. But I never knew it. It made me wonder how much I didn’t know. We had that much 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 the one it could not see.��

For a novel about indigenous identity, Talty opts for a narrator who is, effectively, outside it. Both in terms of blood and in terms of his exile from the reservation. ��To think that the reservation is what makes an Indian an Indian is to massacre all over again the Natives who do not populate it,�� Charles offers, extending the harm caused by racist lawmaking and attempts at erasing indigenous identities (another novel from this year, Wandering Star by indigenous author Tommy Orange—who provides the cover blurb here—rather effectively addresses these issues and is a great companion read to Fire Exit) not only to non-reservation indigenous peoples but everyone. In her book What White People Can Do Next, author and activist Emma Dabiri drives home the point that what enshrines harmful and racist laws is the belief that, if you are white, it does not harm you but calls attention to how the harm is spread across class lines and the hard from such laws oozes over everyone. ��I just need you to recognize this shit is killing you, too,�� she write and here Talty has done an excellent job of crafting a similar vantage point on how Charles, not indigenous, is suffering because these laws. Talty shows how we are all pulled down into the slaughterhouse of these Federal Laws but also does so in a way that doesn’t center whiteness and ensures the Penobscot nation is the focus. In , Talty was asked 'do you feel it’s your responsibility, or purpose, to tell Native stories?' to which Talty responded:

'On one hand, I feel like it’s not my responsibility—I will write and have written stories that do not have Native characters in them—but on the other hand, colonialism and a dominant white readership has made it my responsibility. But then again, maybe it’s not about responsibility in terms of storytelling but rather a responsibility to be a story-keeper, a person who holds onto the stories and passes them down.'

There is a strong cultural heritage throughout the story and Talty nets a lot of nuance in reservation life. The struggles are bountiful for Charles, such as the rampant alcoholism and addictions faced both on and off the reservation. It is a bleak portrayal of life but Talty reminds us that we are all, in some ways, complicit.

��It was Fredrick’s love that made me feel Native. He loved me so much that I was, and still am, convinced that I was from him, part of him, part of what he was part of. That was how I felt about Elizabeth—in truth, she was a descendant only from her mother’s side, and if that were to come out and she were taken off the census, would she feel any less Native? I didn’t think so.��

Talty writes that ��we are made of stories�� and so much of history is the struggle over the dominant narrative and who tells the story. Frederick made him feel he belonged, and what is Charles denying Elizabeth if he doesn’t tell her the truth. But also is it his place to override the story of her life she has always believed? It is an issue he will go back and forth on—Charles can be a frustrating character as he is so much blown about by the wind and while we are empathetic due to the lifetime of damages that have made him this way, it is still painful to watch—but the metaphor extends beyond the personal. The country itself is competing stories, such was the way colonialism took root, and these are the stories of those who have been brought down into generational poverty and addictions with little way out. Early on there is a rather chilling metaphor when Charles thinks about the various stories he has heard about the reservation being built over a graveyard. Regardless of which story is true, the fact remains there is death beneath their feet and we will all add our bones to the pile some day. The only story that is fixed.

��I wanted to say it all: wanted to give her all the history that is hers. This past. This family. I wanted her to know, wanted her to understand what it meant that she was being stretched beyond the walls of her parents' house,��

A big thank you to Isabel’s lovely review which inspired me to read this. Fire Exit is a haunting and harrowing tale, and Morgan Talty expertly pulls at all the heartstrings. On the large scale it is a cutting look at the legacy of trauma and hardship caused by harmful Federal Laws around indigenous identity, yet it also functions as a tragic personal tale of a family caught in these machinations. We are all stories of our history and such histories are subject to the fallibility of memory but with Fire Exit, Talty asks of us to ensure we do not let such history be washed away.

4/5

��all that remained was the charred, burnt wood of the story that is hers.��