From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine's Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth's life—from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there's always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It's the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep. Now, it's been weeks since he's seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can—his home and property; his alcoholic, quick-tempered, and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever deeper into dementia—he becomes increasingly haunted by his past.
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.
