Night of the Living Rez

May 1, 2022
In 12 linked stories, all narrated by a character named David, Talty's debut collection provides an unsparing perspective on the harsh reality of life in the Panawahpskek (Penobscot) Nation of Maine. Drug addiction, mental illness, and economic insecurity haunt Talty's characters, whose personal flaws and straitened circumstances combine to keep them trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair. As a child, in the story "In a Jar," David lives with his mother and her partner, Frick, a part-time medicine man and equally part-time father figure, when his pregnant older sister, Paige, arrives to ratchet up the tension in the family's already overburdened life. By the time David reaches young adulthood, as portrayed in stories like "Burn" and "Get Me Some Medicine," he's hanging out with Fellis, his friend and fellow visitor to the local methadone clinic. The pair spend their evenings drinking and contemplating how they'll get their hands on "pins" (Klonopin), culminating in the story "Half-Life," in which David asks himself, "How'd we get here?" but then wonders whether "the only question that matters" is "How do we get out of here?" For all his stories' terse realism, Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, is adept at unearthing his characters' emotions, as he does in the elegiac "The Blessing Tobacco," in which David's grandmother, well down the road of cognitive decline, believes he's her late brother Robbie, who died as a young boy, and fiendishly punishes him to exorcise her guilt for her role in Robbie's long-ago death. David's observation in the story "Earth, Speak" that "this reservation was for the dead" serves as a mournful benediction over these bleak, but empathetic, tales. Ranging from grim to tender, these stories reveal the hardships facing a young Native American in contemporary America.

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Starred review from May 30, 2022
Talty’s smart and gritty debut, a linked collection, poignantly overlays a boy’s coming-of-age on the Penobscot reservation with a young man’s present-day struggles to overcome opioid addiction and economic precarity, implying that they might be the same person in different phases of life. “In a Jar” introduces young Simpsons-watching David as he copes with an absent mother and her hard-drinking medicine man boyfriend, Frick, who earned his nickname for a habit of saying “fricken this, fricken that.” His older sister, Paige, gets pregnant, stoking their mother’s ire like “Homer on Bart,” and the angry Frick dismisses David for being trigger shy on a hunting trip. Abandoned hunting trips recur throughout, as in “Food for the Common Cold,” about a tragic episode from Frick’s earlier life, and in the interstitial stories following 20-something Dee and his friend Fellis, who talk in “Get Me Some Medicine” about hunting porcupines for money. In “Earth Speak” and “The Name Means Thunder,” Talty reveals more of Dee’s and Paige’s painful histories involving opioids and methadone; the latter story, narrated by a grown-up David, serves both as a standalone meditation on truth-telling and an elegant keystone to the collection. Talty brings an abundance of love and skill to his accounts of troubled lives. The ingenious structure and heartbreaking stories make this unforgettable. Agent: Rebecca Friedman, Rebecca Friedman Literary.

July 1, 2022

DEBUT At one point in Talty's debut, his young characters discuss how many times they will watch the Sherman Alexie-penned film Smoke Signals in the upcoming school year. It's a fitting reference point, as perhaps no work proves a closer touchstone for Talty's short stories than Alexie's story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which served as inspiration for 1998's Smoke Signals. Talty's debut is likewise constructed as a series of interconnected stories centered around a single Indigenous character navigating the small pleasures and existential pangs of modern existence. Here, that's Penobscot narrator David, the sketch of his life told in a collage of 12 stories, moving back and forth between childhood and adulthood and through a cast of memorable orbiting characters. What's so impressive in this story collection--and ultimately what imbues the work with such poignancy--is Talty's restraint, his refusal to opt for sensationalism over authenticity. There's a graceful interplay between his stories here, with portraits of pronounced family tragedy bleeding beautifully into those of gentle childhood hijinks. Talty understands each life as a small mythology, a grand accumulation of minutiae, and brings depth and nuance to each of these stories. The result is a work that builds in power across its pages, its woven narrative tapestry becoming richer and more robust with each successive story. VERDICT Talty's debut story collection is a wonderfully understated work with sneaky emotional force, anchored by a memorable main character and the author's keen understanding of childhoods that have been marked by instability.--Luke Gorham

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October 10, 2022
Talty's remarkable debut circles around and delves into what might at first seem to be an unremarkable life, revealing surprises small and large. At the heart of this collection of linked stories, which move back and forth through time, is David, or Dee, a member of the Penobscot Nation in Maine. We see him first in his twenties, on one of his daily treks out of the reservation to pick up a gram of pot after a visit to the methadone clinic, when he stops to rescue a friend whose hair has frozen in the ice when he dozed off after drinking a bit too much. ("I never thought I'd scalp a fellow tribal member," Dee deadpans.) Next we see him as a little boy, newly moved to the reservation with his mom. Under the front steps, he finds "a glass jar filled with hair and corn and teeth," which leads to the medicine man who has taken up residence with them smudging the house. Ten stories follow these two, filling in the gaps between them and moving beyond. Each story stands firmly on its own, but together, they create a rich and constantly evolving portrait of passive, observant David; his well-meaning, troubled mother; the alcoholic medicine man Frick; and David's volatile older sister, who blows in and out of their lives. Talty keeps the focus tightly on this small world, where Native traditions mix matter-of-factly with binge-watches of The Sopranos, and where David, stuck in place at age 28, muses that the important question is not, "How'd we get here?" but, "How do we get out of here?" With a clear-eyed and compassionate gaze, Talty, step-by-step, reveals the complexity of these characters and the ways they are shaped by their community and their pasts.

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