The woman, it turns out, is his child, Elizabeth, fathered out of wedlock in 1991 with his ex-girlfriend, Mary, a member of the Penobscot Nation. Now, more than two decades after his daughter’s birth, as he watches Elizabeth go to work, Charles is stewing. He regrets how Mary, when pregnant with Elizabeth, dumped him and told him, “The baby can’t be yours.”
Over time, Charles figured out her reasoning: Mary wanted to lie and report that Elizabeth’s father was Native American, so that Elizabeth could earn tribal membership in the Penobscot Nation.
The problem is that all these years later, Charles, now in his 50s, suddenly wants to tell Elizabeth, 27, the truth. Will he get to reveal to his daughter that he’s more than just “a White man who had lived across from her all her life and watched her grow up from this side of the river”?
The book’s central tension, foregrounded by Maine’s fraught tribal history, plays out between two moral imperatives: one man’s wish to tell his biological daughter that he’s her father; and the desire of the daughter’s mother, who believes the disclosure might imperil the child’s status in the Penobscot Nation, not to mention her fragile health and state of mind.
Talty, an award-winning fiction writer and citizen of the Penobscot Nation, has the authority to tell such a story. His first book, “Night of the Living Rez,” was a collection of a dozen short stories that examined addiction, divorce and tragedy on the Penobscot Reservation. Published in 2022, the work won several literary prizes and established Talty as a force who could write about Native American life with humor and solemnity.
What distinguishes “Fire Exit” the most is Talty’s choice of a White protagonist in a Native American community. Charles was raised on the Penobscot Reservation by his White mother and Native American stepfather, but his position as the novel’s narrator forces us to reckon with the degree to which he’s an outsider.
A sympathetic portrait of Charles coheres around the anguishing snippets of his backstory: when he was 13 in 1976, and he and his stepfather — armed with a gun — confronted the enraged father of a childhood friend; or, in 1990, when he was summarily cast off by a pregnant Mary, whom he loved and wanted to spend the rest of his life with; or, in 1991, around the time of Elizabeth’s birth, when he made a decision that might have enabled his stepfather’s death.
“Fire Exit,” though, struggles to achieve propulsion, partly because Charles constantly flits among different decades and presents these intriguing histories without clear time stamps. At various points, I was doing math in the margins to figure out which decade or year Charles was reminiscing about.
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.
Charles, for instance, does not know his biological father, just like Elizabeth does not know hers. When Charles’s beloved stepfather dies on a hunting trip, he happens to perish in the same window of time as Elizabeth’s birth. And when, years later, Charles wants to know whether his ailing mother is eligible for a burial spot on the reservation with her husband, he travels to the chief’s office. There, for the first time in nearly 2½ decades, he just so happens to see Mary, who just so happens to be the office clerk to field his query.
The encounter with Mary is pivotal. He finds the courage to ask about their daughter, and Mary says Elizabeth “could be better, but she’ll be OK.” The fairly vague description leads him to speculate that Elizabeth suffers “in the same way my mother had all her life,” a reference to mental health issues that a doctor implies could be inherited. The coincidences don’t stop. There’s one involving the aforementioned firearm, another with his late stepfather’s home, another with a stuffed elephant doll.
My biggest issue, though, lies with Charles’s motivation. He’s desperate to tell Elizabeth that he’s her father. But he also claims to the reader, with little credibility, that he doesn’t hope she’d love him or that they’d be “brought together.”
“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. That’s the truth, the absolute truth.”
Talty is a beautiful craftsman. But I kept feeling like his narrator was withholding his own absolute truths. Or, at the very least, Charles wasn’t fully leveling with readers who might easily suspect that his ulterior (and understandable) aim was to gain a relationship with his grown daughter, who’d been raised by another man. He never quite convinced me that he wanted to inform Elizabeth merely so that she could understand his side of the family tree or that — cringe — “she should know her body was special.”
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.
Ian Shapira is a staff writer at The Washington Post.
Tin House. 256 pp. $28.95
