The interconnected stories in Night of the Living Rez document in equal parts the bleakness and tenderness of life on the Penobscot Indian reservation in Maine, told through the eyes of our protagonist David.
In a nonlinear structure, we meet David as a young boy, a teenager, and a middle-aged man, navigating a complex heritage while addiction, death, and poverty envelope and at times threaten to suffocate him. These are raw and unflinching stories that would be relentlessly harrowing if it weren’t for the compassionate storytelling and occasional wry humour.
As a child, David is already learning that happiness is just out of reach. ‘A week went by, a week in which happiness seemed to course through our veins like blood,’ he reflects. ‘But since then I’ve come to think that it wasn’t happiness but instead numbness.’ Numbness becomes a recurrent theme as he approaches adulthood. In an attempt to self-medicate the pain away, his life becomes about procuring and consuming an endless supply of pills and making endless trips to the methadone clinic with his friend Fellis.
There’s an oppressive claustrophobia to the stories which so rarely take us anywhere other than the confines of the reservation, a place that is by definition an enclosed, limited space – itself ‘a burial ground’. And our characters’ lives are narrower still – there is no escaping the kind of future they have inherited, the intergenerational trauma that haunts them. Even as they come of age, there’s no real getting out or going anywhere. David and Fellis while away their days taking drugs, smoking, watching Netflix, stealing money. There is a sense that nothing else is waiting for them on the other side of childhood.
‘When I sat down, my grandmother was smiling at me, smirking almost, like she knew the totality of my life, knew where I came from, where I was presently, and where I was going.’
Human connection, though, offers a glimmer of hope. David is loved by his mother, sister, and grandmother – despite, in her ailing mental state, mistaking him as her late younger brother. They make it through as best they can, even when their best isn’t much. They’re fighting an uphill battle against the forces of history, economic disparity, disenfranchisement – but Talty is careful never to hit the reader over the head with these broader themes, instead weaving them into a rich and illuminating narrative.
‘On the side of the road we stood, staring into a path that could bring you about anywhere. The last glimmers of day covered the rez roads, but the trees shrouded the path in darkness, a tunnel of never-ending light.’
His writing about the reservation itself is brilliantly evocative and haunting. The environment is often wet, cold, fecund, inviting, hostile. Hair gets trapped in frozen snow, a carpet of caterpillars is squashed underfoot, dark pines carry branches that sway ‘like smoke.’ It’s a place rendered mythical and that also brings us sharply back to reality: when David and his friends seemingly catch sight of a legendary monster in the woods, it turns out to be David’s inebriated older sister.
We root for our characters, wanting them to want something more for themselves. It’s a poignant and powerful book, keenly observed and compassionately told.
‘Maybe the right question is How do we get out of here? Maybe that’s the only question that matters.’
NOVELS AND TEACUPS 