What if you were in the sandwich generation, but neither your parent nor your child remembered you? I think that was more or less where this was going, anyway. I admit that I struggled with it at times, as the book felt very plain spoken and straightforward, but then kept slipping in literary themes, also. Our hero is a non-native man raised on a Penobscot reserve by his stepfather, now living next to but not on the reserve. While his mother is slowly sliding into dementia, his daughter, just across the river, is raised by a native stepfather, and doesn't know the main character is her biological father. 

He doesn't have a life outside of being pulled between all that, and his existence feels stuck in a confusion of identity. He wants his daughter to know him, but understands her mother's reasons for wanting to raise their child in her culture. At the same time, connections of blood can mean connections of inheritable mental health problems. And he has to wonder if her belonging somewhere can retroactively explain his life (since it doesn't seem like anything else can).

We kept meeting characters who reflected back parts of the problem, but never really let him put the story in place. I don't know if the book answered anything it raises, either, nor was it intended to. Rather it worried away at identity, consanguinity, belonging, memory. The prose was very clean and beautiful, and I kept getting caught on single sentences that felt like perfect fractals of the whole novel. At the same time, it was very hard to like any single character because every choice they made felt mired in compromise. (Very sorry to have missed the book club meeting where we talked about this one.)

I picked up Talty's previous book of short stories because I want more.