chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡'s Reviews > Night of the Living Rez

You ever finish a book and you're just like: oh.

Set in Maine on the Penobscot Indian Nation, the stories in Night of the Living Rez are a beautiful mosaic of intimacies that devastate in their intense, quiet, stunning sincerity. The language is gorgeous: the way Talty writes about rain and wind and fog and ghosts makes you feel as if they were rushing through the very seams of your clothes; the metaphors springing to life, demanding that all five senses be shaken awake.

Talty also has a deft hand with loss, and he is painstakingly attentive to what our damage does to us and what it makes us do, to ourselves and to one another. Reading this book, one feels that these stories are true, not in the sense that they are authentic or factual, but true in some deeper way to a lived experience. In the way that books that are willing to reveal themselves to the readers and reveal the readers to themselves feel true.

I really loved this book. I laughed reading it, and at times, I felt so oppressively sad I could not turn to the next page. There are 12 stories here, or 12 chapters, depending on how you decide to think about it. I don’t know if I can say what genre Night of the Living Rez decidedly belongs to. This is not a novel, and it’s not just a set of linked stories speculating on a shared constellation of themes. It is both—or maybe, neither. Night of the Living Rez holds us in the tension between novel and collection of stories. It’s a book presented in fragments, like a trail through the woods, but the whole it makes is complete, cohesive, and emotionally legible. If I reflect on it hard enough—I think there’s something here that speaks to wholeness in fragmentation. That a thing can be broken and still be loved in its totality.

The center of every story (or chapter) is this: that the intimate gut-deep agonies of generational trauma make their presence felt in everyday life in ways so irrefutable and physically inescapable they can rip us open, spread from one body to another and rip our families apart, rip our bodies apart, and that it takes so much love and patience and compassion to push beyond the impasse of the past and begin the long work of restoration and healing, of recreating ourselves and each other through annihilation, and it is work, make no mistake, and it can last a lifetime, with no guarantee of fruition.

But like Dodie Bellamy had hoped in her essay “On Becoming Undone”, there might just be “tenderness at the end of our undoing.” In this book, Talty writes the kind of bereft and damaged and angry that still leaves room for love. In these stories, there’s the fact of pain—all the harrowing minutiae of being alive where loss is always nearby—but there’s also the fact of love walking up unexpectedly under it. The fact of love within loss.

Ultimately, Night of the Living Rez is a reminder of the ineradicable power of tenderness, of caring for one another in an often less-than-caring world, of loving each other through pain, tentatively, brokenly, and into wholeness.

“… and have you ever tried to walk in such a time of great rupture?”