Works wonderfully well. At once a touching narrative about family and a gritty story about alcoholism, dementia, and longing, Fire Exit is a novel in which past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man's life—while it also entertains what that life could have been ... Talty is an outstanding new voice with a lot to say.
There’s a lovely clarity to Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit ... This novel does not shy away from blistering questions of belonging and identity, but rather leans into them, in taut, often precise prose ... Though Talty’s subject matter is often dark — exploring alcoholism, abandonment, physical violence, emotional abuse — he has a light touch, and draws us in with a calm intimacy ... As with any first novel, there are occasional overreaches. Sometimes the language is stretched beyond clarity ... For all its grandness, Fire Exit sometimes feels more like a collection of linked stories than a self-contained novel. Occasionally, the connective tissue is missing, and the chapters feel discrete ... But this does nothing to dim the novel’s innate strengths.
Struggles to achieve propulsion, partly because Charles constantly flits among different decades and presents these intriguing histories without clear time stamps ... A more significant problem is that the sequence of events and the story’s symbolic devices rely too heavily on a surfeit of coincidences and heavy-handed parallels ... Talty is a beautiful craftsman. But I kept feeling like his narrator was withholding his own absolute truths ... In the end, I wasn’t rooting for what Charles sought so badly. But I was cheering on Elizabeth, and maybe this is Talty’s true achievement. His narrator made me care most about his story’s most vulnerable person.
Reveals a dexterity with the longer form and unflagging affection for his characters ... Occasionally feels padded, slackening Talty's pace, but his psychological lines remain taut as he moves toward a crescendo. There's less social commentary than in his stories, more acute observation of his characters and their blinkered fates ... The next step in an exciting, emerging career.
Poignant ... A gripping ending to a thoughtful, heartfelt exploration of what it means to be part of a family and a community. Is it a matter of blood, biology or simply the bonds of love?
Talty uses the secret-room intimacy of the novel to show us things that feel excluded from other forms of talking and thinking—things whose embarrassing and painful nature have given us an excuse to pretend they don’t exist. His honesty gives a thrilling charge ... It’s Talty’s commitment to the hungover, anti-lyrical nature of fiction that gives the cathartic moments in Fire Exit their beauty and communicative power. At the end of the day, that’s what the book’s realism moves us toward: not the wallowing that makes so many depictions of hardship feel sentimental and exploitative but a desire to show us a reality that we recognize, and in so showing give us something to share—something we can have in common.
A wrenching story of dislocation and regret, sweetened with touches of humor, the novel raises important questions about human connection and belonging.
Because we spend the entire novel inside Charles’ head, our access to other characters is limited, making for a slower, ruminative read in the novel’s first half. When it unfolds, Talty’s gift for dialogue, action, tension, clashes and vivid first-person narration creates wonderful urgency and momentum ... Talty has proven he’s skilled at crafting first-person male narrators: smart, sympathetic men who are struggling and wounded, blinkered by their flaws and prone to royally screwing up, but with a palpable longing for meaningful connection ... Because our understanding of the other characters is limited to Charles’ perspective, their motivations can be somewhat obscure ... Talty has the writing chops and heart to expand his fictional universe and widen the lens — bringing in additional perspectives, raising up more voices and stories. It will be a gift to readers, and to Maine literature, when he does.
Fire Exit is concerned with bodies, with visceral needs not only for food and shelter but for truth. Talty's tersely poetic, descriptive prose grounds this story in the physical. This first novel grapples with family issues and hard choices about love and responsibility; blood, culture, and belonging. It is an utterly absorbing story, always firmly rooted in the corporeal; tough, honest, but not bitter.
