Charles lives across the river from his daughter, watching her grow up from a distance. Elizabeth is unaware that the man on the other side is her father, if she’s even aware of him at all.
Years before, when Mary became pregnant with Elizabeth, she made the decision to leave Charles behind. Because Charles is not of Penobscot descent, and therefore not allowed to live on Maine’s Penobscot Nation, this is the only way to ensure that Elizabeth can grow up Penobscot.
Elizabeth must be of one place, uncomplicated. That is the ideal.
Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, revolves around Charles, who has decided that that ideal isn’t enough to survive on, that a more complex lineage must come to light. After viewing Elizabeth’s life over a dividing line for twenty-seven years, he wants her to know the truth, simply because it is hers to know.
“…I felt she should know her body is special,” Charles thinks at the outset of the novel, “and she should know its history, especially the one it would not tell her and the one she could not see.”
From where he stands and wonders at her life, Charles can tell that Elizabeth is suffering, but he does know that it is linked to his own mother’s suffering, whose depression has long afflicted her. While Charles reckons with this family legacy of illness, Louise, whom Charles refers to by her first name, begins to lose her memory and dredge up past hurts between them, sometimes mistaking Charles for someone else entirely. In this way, Talty constructs a vacuum around Charles, with a daughter who wouldn’t remember him on one end, and a mother who begins to forget him on the other.
Although Charles becomes increasingly disoriented by this tricky heritage, he downplays his own suffering next to the women. “I was no stranger to the great sadness I was filled with,” he reflects, but he minimizes the seriousness of a panic attack, as if his sadness doesn’t touch that of his mother’s, to the point that he may not even call it depression.
It was these erasures of his own suffering throughout Fire Exit that made me pay more attention to Charles’s own state of mind, as his concern for others sometimes mirrored my own experiences with mental health as a man, especially in how I see other men afraid to name their struggles as such.
Talty’s depictions of this stunted masculinity surface amidst the tide of Charles’s focus on the women around him. Charles was raised by Louise and his stepfather, Frederick, who was a member of the Penobscot Nation and made him feel like he belonged despite the lack of a blood connection.
“He loved me so much,” Charles reflects, “that I was, and still am, convinced that I was from him, part of him, part of what he was part of.”
In spite of Charles’s lack of claim to the Penobscot Nation, his remembered sense of belonging propels him to believe that Elizabeth knowing the truth of her bloodline wouldn’t be the end of her claim to her heritage. “Because we’re more than that,” Charles affirms. “Or at least she was—she’d got it in her, that connection to a past time and people, no matter what anybody else said.”
The “truth” in Fire Exit lives somewhere beyond bloodlines, bubbling up in the stories of families that may be passed down or buried. It is not immutable; it may be silenced, but it is still true to those who carry them deep inside their bodies.
As Charles wrestles with the truths of legacies, he considers “that to say blood doesn’t matter was to let her go, to tell her that she was not mine, that we had no connection. And while all of that might have been true, it was all untrue, because I saw her as mine, as part of me.” So while Charles believes his bloodtie to Elizabeth matters, he believes there’s an even deeper connection than blood, one that can’t be made or severed by mere facts, like how she’s already spent twenty-seven years without him. But what that other, more significant connection might be seems inarticulable to Charles, who must confront his own lack of belonging that becomes more apparent as the novel progresses.
Although Charles felt like he belonged to the Penobscot Nation growing up, that security shattered after an incident involving his best childhood friend and the later loss of Frederick. Without these men to turn to, Charles loses sight of himself, to the point of self-annihilation:
I started to have these strange existential thoughts, like I wasn’t really real. It’s hard to explain exactly, because I knew I was real, but I didn’t feel it. It was like my spirit did not match my body, as if my body were where it should be but my invisible innards were not. I could not for the life of me reconcile my existence.
Indeed, as he spends his own life gazing across the river, he operates more comfortably in the realm of the life he isn’t living, imagining himself there—fantasizing about a life that could have been—rather than where he is. He wants the women in his world to be well, but he lacks a notion of what it would mean for a man to strive for the same.
In contrast to Charles wishing belonging for others, as if external to his own need for the same, Talty’s novel is gorgeously interior, forcing Charles deeper into his memories to understand what he really hopes to gain from telling Elizabeth the truth. The scenes of Charles’s life—accumulating loss after loss after loss, from death to betrayal to the decisions people make in feeble attempts to protect their families from more loss—are heartbreaking, in Talty’s reflective voice that he first displayed wondrously in his story collection, Night of the Living Rez. After a tragic incident in their community, Charles notes how Frederick “went on living”:
And this is important, because it’s when, I think, I learned to carry on through an untrue story that pushes back, and this is the moment I thought of the most when I felt hopeless about Elizabeth and her mother, how I’d never see my child so close again.
Throughout Fire Exit, Charles learns that to go on living through untrue stories means to find a way to live in spite of them, to cling fast to his own memories and believe they hold enough truth to carry him forward into some future, however unimaginable it may now seem to him. It may not be the ideal, but it can be enough to survive.
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