Review: 'Night of the Living Rez'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Night of the Living Rez
By Morgan Talty
Literary Fiction Short Stories
Tin House

A young boy, living on the Penobscot reservation with his older sister and mother, gets older but doesn't seem to grow up in a beautifully written set of connected stories. Morgan Talty's Night of the Living Rez centers on David, or Dee, at different ages in a non-linear arrangement. Talty takes advantage of that narrative construction choice to show how, regardless of what is going on in our young narrator's life, there are some constants that affect everything about his life and the lives of his family and friends.

These constants are mostly not positive, which makes the positive parts stand out all the brighter. The stories also show how strongly connected the positive and not-positive are. In "The Blessing Tobacco", a young David visits his grandmother at her house. She is starting to suffer from Alzheimer's and thinks David is her long-dead brother, Robbie. 

Grammy keeps passing him cigarettes at the kitchen table. He hasn't smoked and is pretty sure he'd get in trouble if he did, but his mother told him to just go along with Grammy if she wasn't herself. So he smokes them and she keeps passing more to him, getting more insistent that he smoke them. So of course he's soon sick. Turns out Grammy was punishing Robbie for taking something that happened years before David was even born.

His mostly quiet mother and his usually distressed sister nurse him and he is sent back to fill his grandmother's wood box. The slight guilting, the quiet back-and-forth conversation that sends him back and the ensuing chat with his grandmother are realistically and quietly portrayed. It is real life. As they sit back down at the kitchen table, Grammy is herself and tells David a joke he finds so funny that he has her repeat it.

When Grammy has a bad spell later, the arguing that David's mother and sister had been doing is dropped as they unite in taking care of of their elder. She again mistakes David for her dead brother. Later, David dreams that he knew Robbie and has memories of them hunting or fishing together. The way the end of the story is written is indicative of why this book can take hold of one's heart and head:

"... and after all that we walked away through mud or snow until I stopped walking but he kept on going and going and going out there in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest until he was gone."

Gone in more ways than one.

David spends a lot of time with his friends. Whether they're playing an elaborate game of sticks and stones, or smoking, drinking and even doing drugs, the boys are together or looking for each other. They are just as apt to steal from each other as they are to give each other things. It's fascinating that they don't hold grudges and fall right back into hanging out together. David even spends significant time living at their houses when he and his mother cannot abide each other.

His father is mostly out of the picture. David's parents divorced when he was quite young and his dad moved away. He isn't a good provider and doesn't come to visit his kids, but when something goes wrong someone usually reaches out to call him and make him part of what's happening. And one of the other family members shuts him out. Again, the pattern is repeated.

The other major character is Frick, his mother's boyfriend who first appears in his role as a medicine man when Paige has a crisis. His role within the family has a most definitive trajectory:

He was a medicine man who had been forgetting to pray in the mornings and at night, forgetting to feed the spirits once a month.

For the most part, the fights and quarrels and bickering and hurtful things separate the characters. But then something comes up and, for the most part, they are there for each other. Throughout everything that happens to each family member in Night of the Living Rez, that love underneath the trauma holds:

Mom had driven fast. Real fast, and she watched me most of the time during the drive, as if I had been her road the whole way to our new home.

Remembrances: 'You Know When the Men are Gone'

You Know When the Men are Gone
By Siobhan Fallon
Literary fiction short stories
January 2011
Amy Einhorn Books
ISBN: 0399157204

It rarely pays to go into any reading experience with my expectations already in place. Those expectations might be confirmed. There is the danger, however, that other ideas or insights might be lost or not given their due weight.

That was nearly my experience reading the short stories in You Know When the Men Are Gone. The collection about Army families centers around Fort Hood, and was written by Siobhan Fallon, who was an Army wife staying at Fort Hood while her husband was on two tours of duty in Iraq.
The focus is on the women and children at home, although there also are powerful insights about those who are actively serving. From the opening pages describing how the colors and tone of the base change when the troops ship out, Fallon puts the reader amongst those who stay behind.

I had expected that reading these stories would reinforce my belief that our troops need to come home from Afghanistan and Iraq. And without Fallon being political, my belief was reinforced. Characters go through heartache and harm because the troops are overseas.

But this collection of stories has something else to impart. From the beginning, I had the sense of remembering the few months I spent on base as a tween. I'm the rare Air Force brat who spent most of her life in her hometown while my father spent three tours of duty in Thailand during the Vietnam War era.

In town, we were sometimes looked down on; in stores, for example, we weren't regarded as reliable customers. I remember a particularly embarrassing episode at the local department store when the clerk somehow found out Dad was in the Air Force and not employed at a regular dad job in town. She looked us up and down while Mom was having us try on winter coats and wondered aloud whether Mom could afford to buy the coats.

This was Mom's hometown in addition to her children's hometown; she was visibly affected. Her shoulders slumped and she seemed to become physically smaller as she quietly told the clerk that yes, we could pay. It was the only time I saw my mother shamed.

The characters shopping at the commissary took me back to our marathon monthly shopping sessions on base, trudging up and down endlessly long aisles and looking at loads of things we never put in the cart -- whatever we bought that day, including milk and bread, had to last the month until next month's money came through. There were nights we had creamed hard-boiled eggs over toast and didn't realize that was the only food left.

The characters at the base hospital took me back to other corridors that also seemed to never end and always being sent here, there, up and down and around whenever we went -- check-in here, records there, X-ray over in that wing, the examining room in another area.

Just as my mother had to cope and make do while Dad was off on the other side of the world, the women and children in Fallon's stories, decades later, do the same. A mother, uncertain if her cancer has returned and due for a doctor's appointment, leaves the hospital when her angry teen-age daughter trots off with her kindergarten-aged brother. Calling the MPs brings an ineffective youngster whose report may reflect on Dad's record, Dad is on base but can't leave because of trouble in the Green Zone, the doctor is ready to tattle on her because she missed the appointment when the schools' secretaries called about the kids.

Many of the characters are on the edge; their lives could fall apart if they let them, if they believe something other than the best of their mates (regardless of the truth), if they fail to hold on any longer. When the worst that can happen does, the character most affected is not left alone to fall apart.

Most of the characters at home don't reach out for institutional help, and it's not primarily because of possible strikes against the active duty soldier. It's because of pride, of not wanting to be looked down on for not coping better, of not being shamed in front of the others also going through hardships, of not being pitied by the others when they talk about you.

That's when it occurred to me. These huge institutions such as the military will not and, as they exist now, cannot, serve the individual. Yet the individuals and their families are required to give and give and give.

An individual can rarely give enough and the least failing, the smallest inability to go above and beyond because of other circumstances, the least attempt to bring different thinking or acts into the mix, are deeply frowned upon. The repercussions can be out of proportion to the action taken or not taken, in order for the institution to continue to function as it has.

It's not that this is new to me; I've seen it happen during the course of three different careers. But the impact of the calm way in which Fallon describes the lives of the dependents of those in active service (imagine how impersonal it is to be called a "dependent" and not even a wife or child or, gracious, a human being in one's own right) brought it into sharp focus.

And that's especially true for someone who believes some institutions need to exist because of the possible benefit they can provide to individuals in a more perfect society -- public education, improved infrastructure, public safety and health care. How can institutions continue to function in a personally stifling way when their existence came about in order to improve people's lives?

It's not like I have an answer, but it is something I'm going to continue to consider. But I'm also going to continue to be proud of the families who wait for their service members to return home.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Train of Small Mercies'

1968 just about broke America's heart with assassinations, riots and war protests. After Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, apparently on the brink of winning the Democratic nomination for the presidency, tens of thousands mourned the loss of promise and felt sorrow for his pregnant widow and other family members.                                                          

The funeral train that carried RFK's body from New York to Washington, D.C., for interment at Arlington National Cemetary became one of those great national events when people come together. It is possible that 2 million people waited along the tracks of the route to pay their respects. For photographs of that journey, there is a poignant archive of Paul Fusco's work.

David Rowell uses the train's voyage as the focal point of his first novel, The Train of Small Mercies, and through the stories of many characters presents a narrative of quiet hope that arrives when least expected. It is not always evident along the journey that any of the characters will see hope, and not everyone has a happy ending. The climax of many characters' stories is melodramatic, especially for two cases when things go drastically wrong at the end.