STARRED Book Review: Fire Exit

Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

A quiet and original novel about an outcast, a loner, who clings to hope even when the world is pitted against him

Creating quiet stories requires exceptional talent. In order to pull a novel like this off, the writer needs a memorable protagonist too: a Jay Gatsby or Anna Karenina or Ignatious J. Reily type who lodges in the reader’s mind like an old friend. Think Dennis Johnson’s “Fuckhead,” from Jesus’ Son, a character who readers would recognize from any Iowa dive bar, but whose depth, whose insights about life, ask the reader to reconsider what they know.

Now we can add Charles Lamosway to this list. Lamosway’s is a story about blood quantum, the controversial measure of how much “Indian blood” a body contains as a way to determine whether or not someone belongs as a member of their tribe. Because of blood quantum, Lamosway is booted off the Penobscot Reservation when he turns 18, and now, as a middle-aged man, he watches his estranged daughter Elizabeth who is being raised by a Penobscot stepfather and her mother across the river.

Charles observes the life he almost had unfolding across the river, wondering which parts of himself flow through his daughter’s veins, knowing what she doesn’t: that his blood is not legally native, that according to blood quantum, she doesn’t belong. When, as an adult, Elizabeth returns to her parents’ reservation home, Charles considers whether now is the right time to tell her the truth.

Following Talty’s debut collection of linked short stories about young Penobscot men, Fire Exit reads almost as a sequel or at least an expansion of Night of the Living Rez’s world. Lamosway watches the reservation from his yard just across the river, listens to the goings on through the small-town rumor mill. Themes of family tie Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit together, but a keen reader will also pick up on a few easter eggs, acts of delinquency performed by the Night of the Living Rez protagonist and his friends, which reverberate into Charles Lamosway’s outsider world. 

Charles is an outsider. He rarely takes action or interferes. His conflict is primarily internal. In fact, the entire novel seems to be narrated from that backyard seat with Lamosway meandering into the past for a chapter or two before considering the present time predicaments he’s faced with: namely his mother Louise who has struggled with debilitating depression and is devolving further into dementia, and his alcoholic friend Bobby. Front and backstory weave in and out of each other in a plot that is less linear and more like picking apart threads of a tattered tapestry.

Lamosway, as a protagonist, isn’t necessarily driven by anything. He feels the need to tell his biological daughter the truth but is prohibited from doing so by his daughter’s mother. He wants to belong to the tribal community but is prohibited by arbitrary laws. He wants to drink, but he knows his tendency toward alcoholism and refrains. While Lamosway holds down a job “clearing the land,” all of his drive has been tempered by forces outside of his control. But as the family and community he surrounds himself with struggles and falls apart, he does his best to hold the world around him together. 

Lamosway’s character growth, though minimal, is depicted quite brilliantly; each shift in personality, each flash of irrational anger sloshes out of a deep well. And Talty uses this backstory of injustice as a rising tension; to read Fire Exit is to wait either for Lamosway to get a break or for him to be broken.

While Talty’s narrative is already irresistible, especially for readers who enjoyed Night of the Living Rez, it is also filled with Charles Lamosway’s wisdom, a philosophical depth that lingers beyond the page. Phrases such as “You are who you are, even if you don’t know it” and “We’re all alike, even when we’re not” may come off as platitudinous, but the phrases bookend a meandering mental journey.

Given the context of an aging man who has been booted from his home and estranged from his family, such truisms are evidence of strength and a will inside Lamosway to forge on and not give in to a world that in many ways is out to get him. Lamosway’s is a wisdom that cannot be taught, only gained by hard living and hard work and hard-earned comprehension of the human condition. He, like all the aforementioned memorable characters, reveals a depth often overlooked in quiet characters outside the purview of much of society.

When all is said and done, Fire Exit is one of those books that will become more meaningful with the days, weeks, and months after closing the cover. Talty depicts an ages-old hurt that would send the best of us to perplexity, but he shows it through Charles Lamosway’s eyes. These are the steps Charles takes because he must, because he can be cut out of his family, his community, his place, his land, but no one can sever his body from what his spirit desires.

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