Book review: Night of the Living Rez

Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez is about a family’s life, centred on one boy, then a man, told in twelve parts. It reluctantly makes the case for even being a single story—at least in the marketing. It takes place on, maybe even through, the Panawahpskek Nation (or Penobscot, depending on things), in Maine. It’s funny, unexpected. What starts as laugh-in-your-head-but-not-out-loud funny morphs into something different. It builds on you. It closes in. Eventually, I had water leaking from my eyes. What you walk away with is complex emotionally, but simple in delivery.

Thankfully it is not at all full of itself, like some self-indulgent family stories can be. Clever and warm, about things people often describe coldly at arm’s length, in judgemental, or ill-conceived ways—after I read it, I wanted to know more. I then realised it came out in 2022, won lots of prizes, and now is available in paperback here for the first time, or maybe recently. Whatever. It’s here.

It is also very true to life, if you have any experience of tricky families, either of the outdated “coming from a broken home” variety, or the more recent “disadvantage” kind. Whatever euphemism you choose, this book is related to that. There’s a sense of something deeper and otherly that lurks in an off-kilter, light-hearted way in the characters.

On the cover it’s sold with a free-floating sub-title, without a colon, as STORIES. And that is what they seemed like. Then I realised the views were related. Or the stories made up the story. And then I realised it was jumping around in time. And then I realised the book is one thing, fractured.

I raise all that, as I assume that the person who reads this review will be in Australia, or from Australia. We’re on a NSW website, buried deep in click-through webpages (… actually, sorry, in a nice way, why are you here? This is the Law Society. Book reviews? … No, no, don’t say that they said—I’ll move on. Ok, good to have you). I raise the Australia thing, because I bet, like me, you don’t have any first-hand experience with Native American day-to-day life as part the Penobscot Nation, like the author, Morgan Talty?

Oh, you do, and that’s why you’re here?

Oh.

Ok, well let’s just talk about how I don’t, and that kind of relevance to the book. Because it is a great book. I would say it seems mundane in an entertaining way, for a while—sort of like Reservation Dogs. You know that show? No? Ok. This isn’t going well.

Anyway, dementia pops up, but with dark humour. There’s booze. Threats of violence. But there’s comedy. It always feels like you’re just, well, there. It’s not Drama. Alongside the behaviour based in what can only be described as different belief systems, but I suspect are ways of feeling the things we really all do, it’s all caught up in a multi-relationship, multi-generational, cracked, family. You start wondering why those cracks are there. Then it starts to jump in wholly unexpected ways.

And, if, like me, you read this basically on a whim, because it sounded vaguely interesting from the few lines of synopsis you read, and you were curious, then read it. You’ll see a family, in many different ways.