Fire Exit by Morgan Talty review – secrets and lies in Maine

Charles Lamosway, the lone wolf narrator of Morgan Talty's debut, is uncompromising in his opinions, not least when he turns his gaze towards his own situation. On the state of his home in Maine, located by a river that borders the reservation of the Indigenous Penobscot people, Charles is blunt: "The kitchen chairs around the table jutted out and away, and the rug under the table was bunched up. The sink was filled with dishes and glasses and mugs. The garbage wasn't full, but the plastic tub needed a wash. Coffee grounds littered the bottom ... the place had a smell to it. Not foul-smelling but there was a smell, and I won't be so delusional as to say it was a good one." In this lean, serious, impressive novel, desire for orderliness and cleanliness is pointed, with these states literally and metaphorically out of Charles's desperate reach.

Because while Talty's prose is exacting and balanced – sentences that are, as Baldwin would have it, "clean as a bone" – Charles's existence is anything but. An ascetic recovering alcoholic who is "not Penobscot" but grew up within the tribe, Charles is the sole carer for his mentally unpredictable mother, Louise. His primary confidant is Bobby, a sometimes comic loose cannon, prone to wild outbursts, whose struggles with the bottle are much less successful than Charles's have been. And Charles finds himself, at the start of the novel, in need of a confidant. A secret he has kept for decades, which gives the narrative its absorbing and mythic premise, begins to press on his thinking with irresistible force: when he was young he fathered a child, Elizabeth, with a Penobscot woman, Mary. Mary and Elizabeth live on the other side of the river that passes by his property and he can see on to their land. But the truth of Elizabeth's mixed racial heritage has been concealed from her and her community in order to prevent her losing her place within the tribe. Here, in this context of miscegenation, the role of secrecy is to preserve the illusion of racial purity – another kind of cleanliness, perhaps. But with his mother's and his own mortality very much in mind, this lie of origins, this thwarted possibility of continuing his own bloodline, troubles Charles unbearably. Perennial moral questions about the virtues of truth-telling in all instances are handled here with real urgency.

Charles laconically remarks that "going to Alcoholics Anonymous makes you think a lot about the past and how it shapes you". Throughout Talty's plot – a tight braid of storylines about whether Charles will confront Elizabeth with news of her parentage against Mary's wishes, about Elizabeth's ill health, and about the management of Louise's decline – memories irrupt to further problematise Charles's pursuit of clarity. Though Charles might claim that "sometimes simplicity is truest and best", he is repeatedly haunted by – and cannot escape - the complex circumstances of his stepfather's death and a sense of culpability surrounding this. The stain of childhood trauma remains, too: brutal domestic abuse and insidious homophobia meted out by the father of his quicksilver schoolfriend Gizos surfaces anew. This is a novel with "years of silence" at its core; it bristles with fiercely internalised feeling and enigmatic tension. It's a novel of guns and hunting and snow drifts, one where violence is a dim but ever-present reality. It's a novel that will no doubt be described in some quarters as being written in "muscular prose". But the narrative's moments of softness, instigated by men or between men, represent some of the most powerful writing, and are expressed in a register that points towards the numinous. There's an incredible moment, soaring in its beauty and tenderness, when Charles remembers Gizos weeping as a child, after a terrible betrayal:

"Now I know such a thing could do the world good, not the crying, not simply the body's and spirit's self‐recognition of pain, but the publicness of it, the body and spirit's communicating to another body and spirit in one and only one language – that of deep, deep emotion – between the flesh of two bodies."

Indeed, in its unvarnished depictions of Charles caring for his mother – the role of a stuffed toy elephant in all this is both surreal and tremendously affecting – and in the emergent relationship between Elizabeth and Charles, Fire Exit upholds the belief that communion, "the invisible rope of having experienced each other", may well be messy but offers unparalleled meaning and dignity to life.