"Fire Exit" by Morgan Talty

Does our identity depend upon our heritage? And is our heritage passed down to us through 'blood' or 'stories'?

The narrator, Charles, is the stepson of Frederick, a member of the Penobscot nation, an indigenous people living in Maine. Because Charles doesn't qualify as Penobscot he is not allowed to live on the reservation. Instead he lives across the river and spends his days watching his daughter growing up with her mother and another man. Meanwhile his mother, Louise, who has battled episodes of depression throughout her life, is now drifting into dementia.

He wants to tell his now adult daughter that he is her father. “She needed to know that her blood was her blood. nothing could take that away, and nothing could even come close to capturing it.” (Ch 12) He hasn't really grasped the implications: not only does that cast doubt on her identity as Penobscot but also she will discover that her parents have been lying to her all these years. 

It's a nice conundrum. The narrator is obsessed by bloodline and yet many of the deepest and most meaningful relationships in this book are between people with no genetic connections, such as Charles with his beloved stepfather and Bobby with Louise. 

The subplot of his mother's voyage into dementia is a counterpoint that reinforces and strengthens the theme.

I found the first chapter very confusing (even after I discovered I had skipped two pages and returned to reread them). But the structure of the plot is nicely balanced between keeping the reader guessing, letting curiosity drive the page-turning, and providing sufficient information. It ends in a dramatic climax with is both surprising and a necessary consequence of what went before; Aristotle would have approved.

Selected quotes:

• “I knew her only by the conversations we had on the phone, her body the shape of a voice on the other end of the line.” (Ch 3)
• “The only true thing I could be certain about ... was that blood is messy, and it stains in ways that are hard to clean, especially if that stain can't be seen but we know it is there, a trail of red or dark red leading back to a time we cannot go to remove it.” (Ch 6)
• “I wasn't sure Louise knew who I was anymore, but I was quite certain I was nobody. And as I sat there I felt myself slipping away to damp depths of sadness as I had done the night before, and I was thinking and thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, ever ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat.” (Ch 21)
• “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?” (Ch 26)

November 2024; 292 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God