Subduction

by Kristen Millares Young

"Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and a betrayal by her sister, in the throes of a midlife freefall, Latina anthropologist Claudia retreats from Seattle to Neah Bay, a Native American whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of her guide, a spirited hoarder named Maggie. But when, spurred by his mother's failing memory, Maggie's prodigal son Peter returns seeking answers to his father's murder, Claudia discovers in him the abandon she craves. Through the passionate and violent collision of these two outsiders, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their imperfect attempts to find community on the Makah Indian Reservation"--

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Native American, Latinx, Adult, Race

222 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 14, 2020

Reviews

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

subduction: n, the action or process in plate tectonics of the edge of one crustal plate descending below the edge of another.

Subduction is a truly impressive debut, with controlled, poetic prose, and an almost mannered way of depicting tradition, marginalization, and the human longing to belong—all with the natural world at its center.

Claudia is a forty-year-old Mexican-American anthropologist, whose husband has left her for her sister; on a trip to Neah Bay, Washington, to continue her ethnographic study of the Makah tribe’s penchant for storytelling and song, Claudia’s path crosses with Peter, her main Makah subject Maggie’s black sheep son, who left the reservation some twenty years earlier after discovering his father’s dead body.

Kristen Millares Young pulls this off without any flair or melodrama; in fact, some of the fairly graphic sex scenes are among the most violent in the whole book (i.e., this ain’t no romance). Instead, Young’s prose questions who has the right to belong, how stories unite family units and whole communities, and also how outsiders—as both our main characters feel themselves to be—are viewed by a Native American tribe clinging to its identity, while having lost so much of it as each generation passes (“Anything claimed by one was lost by another”).

Subduction also contains some of the most evocative prose about the natural world that I’ve read in some time, with passages like this:

Rocks below the tide-line held in their wakes braided rivers of outflow whose patterns replicated flood-furrowed land east of here, ravages of the last ice age.

As Christian Keifer puts it in his review in The Paris Review:

The title of the book refers to the geological phenomenon of one tectonic plate sinking under the influence of another, during which both subsumed and overriding plates are wracked by distortion and disruption. In Young’s novel, the answer to which is which is left beautifully unclear.

And this is resoundingly true. Even the structure of the novel is controlled yet racing toward an inevitable collision; in a less talented writer’s hand, Subduction would have veered off into explications, tangible either/ors, but Young keeps her novel’s focus so taut and almost cosmological that it’s not only a gem, but it’s a near masterpiece of now, and a haunting case study of longing and belonging:

Who is at peace with the daylight between who we are and who we thought we’d be?

Highly recommended: this marks the beginning of a literary career well worth following along.

4.5 stars, rounded down

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claudia's husband has just left her for her younger, lusher, more exuberant sister. This profound betrayal sitting heavily on her thin shoulders, Claudia bolts from suburban Seattle to the edge of the contiguous United States: Neah Bay, on the Pacific Ocean side of the Olympic Peninsula, and the Makah tribal lands where she has been conducting anthropological research.

Peter, a native son, left the Makah reservation over twenty years earlier and travelled the world as an underwater welder. One recent day, while welding a bridge support, Peter — hungover, deeply depressed — shits the inside of his wetsuit when he is frightened by a giant wolf eel rising from the murky depths of the Puget Sound. He thinks the sea monster is the ghost of his father, who bled to death on the kitchen floor, his murder never solved. Peter abandons his job and returns to Neah Bay, where his now-elderly mother wanders the highway, in search of the memories she is losing to dementia.

These two troubled, searching souls collide like tectonic plates, all friction and desire, anger and appetite, upsetting the fragile balance of this community struggling to hold onto its stories and traditions that have been exploited, appropriated, and misunderstood. Claudia, herself an outsider, a Mexican immigrant who came to the States as a child with her half-sister and young mother, questions both her ability to preserve the Makah songs and stories as academic research, and the assumption that she has the right to do so. Peter is compelled to take up the mantle of his tribe's cultural traditions, but resists the call, feeling betrayed by his family, community, and the unsettled question of his father's death.

Millares Young's prose is by turns resplendent and tough, a mirror of the heartbreakingly beautiful landscape she portrays. The hush of a December rain as it drips through dense, green forest coexists with the cymbal crash of waves on the rocky coast, just as the quiet moments of reflection as Claudia and Peter sift through the wreckage of their individual lives coexist with the explosive force of their passion.

Gorgeous, unsettling, gritty and fertile, Subduction questions which stories belong to whom and whose voices are heard in their retelling. This novel rocked me to my core. Highly recommended.

[Nicole Hardina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writers will want to read this book with a pencil close by for the craft at every level: the lines, seamless transitions from summary to scene, tense dialogue, and for searching out the author's many choices. Subduction gets at the tension implied by its title indirectly, embodied by the protagonist, who asks, "Who is at peace with the daylight between who we are and who we thought we'd be?" Her struggle to answer lets us consider the depth and complexity of family and the implications of past and ongoing colonization, as well as what we do when we intentionally choose against tradition, as women, as men, as people who do and do not belong. Near the end of the book come these lovely lines: "These people were family. Their song filled the room, surely uncontained by its walls, surging onto the street to meet the rain and wind, carried through cedars swaying above the sea, ceaseless from her to where the west meets its end." I love here how the family exists in the song, altogether comprised of and greater than its individuals and something else entirely. Water seeks its own level, but song and sound are more powerful than that — as powerful as culture, as family.

[Gretchen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I could give this book two different ratings.

The first rating would be for the reading experience it provided. I settled on 2 stars. I appreciate the obvious effort, research, and care the author put into the writing of the book, but the writing often felt overwrought and a bit tortured. The book felt like a product of a very personal writing process for the author, and as a reader I had difficulty getting in.

The second rating I wish I could give is for the discussion experience it provided. This book was definitely a 5-star discussion book. I read the book as part of a trusted book club, and it gave us so much to talk about concerning specific elements in the book as well as larger issues in society today and throughout history.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am mixed about this book. While I think the descriptions of the natural world are gorgeous, and there are some very tender moments between characters, and the peak into the culture of the Makah people at times seemed well-done and was interesting, I just don't really know how I feel about the main character. Yes, she is struggling with a lot of things in her personal life, but at the same time, I don't really get her research and how she could legitimize the choices she makes in the book. At the end, without explanation or closure for what she has done or will do next, I was just left with a feeling of, "so what, and why???" Plus, I don't know if this book is supposed to be self-aware, but there were some very cringe-y moments of weird anthropological stereotyping, like when the main character, who is an anthropologist, said she was grateful that "Indians speak slowly."

[Keila Ville · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Latina anthropologist and strong female character leaves her troubled life behind and explores her own identity whilst researching the Makahs in the US Pacific Coast. Her work takes her to experience love and loss in a whole new way. In the meantime, she explores her surroundings and identifies herself not only with the community she starts living with but with the landscape that surrounds her.
Prose is luscious. I enjoyed reading this book very much.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seattle author, about a female anthropologist studying Makah culture. lovely to read about familiar haunts like the peninsula and Shi Shi, (I could practically smell the ocean) but her sexual relationship with tribal man was so soul-less it was hard to read. I had a hard time caring about any of the characters.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

After her husband starts an affair with her sister, Mexican-American anthropologist Claudia flees her family and her life to a place she feels safe; the Makah Nation, an Indigenous people of the Pacific coast living on the northwestern tip of Washington state. Claudia has been researching the songs, stories and artefacts of the Makah, despite being troubled by the line between study and appropriation. At the same time, Peter returns to his community after a long absence to care for his ageing mother, Maggie; the traumatic death of his father severed him from his culture and makes him feel he has to work twice as hard to belong. At a sweat ceremony joined by a white man, 'His vision greyed around the edges. His ears popped like he was underwater... They sat, liquefying. He would not get up before the white guy.' The portrait of Peter is a real strength in Subduction, otherwise a bit of a MFA litfic paint-by-numbers. Kristen Millares Young paints him as casually misogynistic, in a very everyday way; there's a hint of machismo, but he's not that committed to it, perhaps because his job as an underwater welder is proof enough of masculinity; he wants acceptance but he isn't truly desperate. As he points out, even those who've stayed living on the rez are not closely connected to their cultural heritage either: 'His mother didn't speak a word of Makah. Never had. Neither had his dad. She was turning Indian in her old age.' Claudia tells the reader: 'The elders now were not the old-timers who remembered life in the longhouse... The eldest of the elders now were the once-resentful children of those shipped off to boarding schools to be stripped of their native language and family bonds.' In contrast, Claudia's story relies on a familiar trope that I loathe more every time I see it in fiction. Not a must-read, but a novel that grew on me as I went through it, despite this unfortunate twist. 3.5 stars.

[Douglas Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

The journey of Subduction is first of all a story of displacement and dislocation: Claudia, who’s Latina heritage lies back over a border beyond the father she grew up with, and whose sense of family lies back beyond the betrayal that broke it; and for Peter, whose tragic fracture from family and community instills an “inner nihilist”(176). But Subduction is also, secondly, a story of healing, through both traditional cultural practices and the kind of practices that transcend politics and place, namely the love two people feel for each other and the result of that love bringing together lines of history, culture and spirit in the mysterious form of a new life. At heart, Subduction is an optimistic novel, for out of the mess of politics and power imbalances and cultural confusion, love does indeed bring forth and create the way for a new kind of life, even if the people involved stay “coiled inside this illusion” (264) and ���glad of the mask” (264).

[Cheryl Walsh · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this book. Neither of the main characters jelled for me; I couldn't understand their motivations much of the time, which is pretty strange because they seemed to be constantly considering their motives, but their actions didn't line up with their thoughts. That might have been an intentional technique, but I just found it confusing and irritating. The writing went from being overly detailed to elliptical to didactic. The book may simply demand more attention and care in reading than I was willing to give it, and other readers who can relate more to the characters would get more out of it. Or it may be that it needed another draft or two to make the story come together.

[Anca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky to read an early version of Subduction. I was struck by the rich complexity of each of the characters—their grit, passions, flaws—and the gorgeous depiction of the dramatic Neah Bay landscape. The supernatural elements intersecting with mythology and Claudia's psychological unraveling created a reading experience that was at times harrowing, at times eerily beautiful.

[Carol Hislop · Rating 2 out of 5]

One star for the location of the book - I'd like to visit Neah Bay, it sounds beautiful. A second star for learning about Makah traditions and museum. The story, though was unbelievable and disjointed which was disappointing and annoying to read.

[Eile Goett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just thought why?? The most descriptive and provoking part was the sex scenes and it made me question why even more. In the end she was there to exploit the Makah’s and the book focused on the romance more than the mother and son trying to preserve their culture.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very much enjoyed this atmospheric short novel set on the Makah reservation on the Olympic Peninsula. Told from two points of view, the novel is a story about the nature of belonging--and our resistance to it. An anthropologist, Claudia, experiencing the breakup of her marriage under truly humiliating circumstances, returns to her fieldwork on the Makah reservation, collecting song and stories from Maggie, an elderly woman now falling into dementia. Claudia, a Latina who has left her heritage behind when she emigrated to the United States to live with her assimilated father, has been estranged from her sister Maria, who remained in Mexico following their mother's death. Having become reunited, her sister goes on to steal the work-obsessed Claudia's husband from her. This sets up half the book--Claudia's study of another's culture when she has left her own behind.

the other half of the tale is from the point of view of Maggie's son Peter, who left the reservation twenty years earlier, in anger and abandonment following the mysterious death of his father. He has returned to care for his failing mother, and finds Claudia on the scene. A man who likes women, he is drawn to her as an outsider--the weight of his culture is something he has tried to flee, so it clashes with Claudia's project. These two troubled individuals come together in a rough love story that is always informed by their secrets and unspoken needs.

It was beautifully written and so brings in that mysterious, fog-enshrouded terrain with its mythologies of Thunderbird and Whale and the trickster mink.

"The sea stood up and \toppled over, dragging kelp and sand into itself before rising again and again, reaching for the shore. Its passage left a thick sheen on the crust of crushed shells, which rolled on their sides and sighed, sated."

"Peter parked in front of the BEER CROSSING sign. The bar windows were lined with plywood and PBR ads to protect the. patrons from being seen and those outside from seeing. He watched Claudia maneuver her SUV into a space hidden from the high way by a white van with a faded FOR SALE sign taped to its back window. She hopped out and hurried toward hi, still dressed like she was about to go hiking. What is it with white women from Seattle? It's like they all died and went to an outdoors store...."

[Geri C · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pulled into the lives of the dysfunctional, broken main characters and kept routing for them to find healing before the book's conclusion. Life, however, doesn't always wrap up with neat fairytale endings.
Millares Young provides us a peak into the culture of those with ancestral rights to Neah Bay, while respecting their desire to keep the sacred private.
Every chapter left me eager to learn more, while grounding me in the familiar.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

People have already said all the right things about this book. I wanted to add that I chose this book for COVID book club, and Kristen actually came and spoke over Zoom. The readers were loving it, asking questions about the characters, the plot, the Makah, because they loved the book. It just reinforced what I already thought, that both the book and its author are intelligent, important, and beautiful.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Relevant, potent, and brilliantly crafted. Kristen Millares Young takes her fierce intelligence into deep territory, where cultural collisions meet sexual/political tension and transformation. READ IT.

[Dylan Zucati · Rating 5 out of 5]

The living influence of all things, animate or otherwise, drives the core of this novel. Beginning with a ferry to Bainbridge and ending in a community auditorium, the settings of Subduction are as important to the plot as its characters. Kristen Millares Young uses every inch of the page to tell this story. I was constantly falling into the descriptions of rooms in trailers and houses, while fascination took me in the very real conversations happening between characters the characters living in Neah Bay. From the first moments on the Puget Sound, this book became cement in my mind, creating a base that I will compare other stories to.

The major hurdle a reader might stumble upon in Subduction is the not-entirely-likable main characters. As people, they’re pretty bad, but in the toxic stew of their internal navigation and outward behavior, is a reality that can often get lost in a novel. Claudia and Peter never falter from their path to appear as better people to the reader. Their redeeming qualities are sincere, never coming to the page for the sake of counterbalancing, instead existing just as their lesser actions, as the plain and simple truth of their character. Claudia’s self-serving debate between being the thieving colonizer and preserving cultural heritage, coupled with her ultimate decision at the end of the novel was not played up for plot. It reinforced who she was just as Peter’s internal misogyny lived alongside his, albeit reluctant, kindness. There was never another decision either of them would make, even when every cell in my body begged for it.

In my role as Event Staff at one of my day jobs, I get to meet really interesting people. Kristen Millares Young is someone I met several times. We’ve talked for maybe an hour in total, and I can say she’s a very kind and generous person, speaking with such interest in what we were chatting about, that I believed she cared more than some of my friends might in the same conversation. At the most recent event I saw her at, I mentioned that I was reading her book, that I was really enjoying it. We talked at length about writing and books we were reading, but there were two things she mentioned about Subduction that I began to see immediately. Fractals, and traditionally western plot being shaped like a male orgasm.

Fractals are fascinating and show up naturally in most writing anyways. Allegories and metaphors are often fractals, or at least fractally ways of writing. What I enjoyed so much about seeking them out in Subduction was how they seemed, much like the characters, as natural as anything you’d find in real life. The retelling of folklore that imitated Peter or Claudia, Claudia’s reflection on famous cultural observers she would unintentionally step in the same footsteps of as she continued her stay in Neah Bay, familial tendencies passed along unintentionally and playing out unexamined. It’s something more than allegory or metaphor, though a lot of these moments could still be fit into either category. I’m fascinated by the slight, intentional difference these moments have in Subduction, though they are not the only literary device that stands out.

It doesn’t take much looking at any Freshman Lit. Narrative Structure Diagram to see what Young means about traditionally Western plot being shaped like the male orgasm. She cited Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode as a different path to take. I can’t say without reading that book how exactly Young pulls it off in Subduction, but it was clear even before our interaction that her book was doing something different than what I was used to reading. It was fascinating to read the rest of the book with that in mind, watching for the spiral and anticipating the explosion; seeing how aspects of the plot that I thought required resolution could just exist as features of the characters lives. Existence is brutal, it’s wonderful, it’s mundane, it’s magical, but is rarely neat and tidy for you to look at like a preserved insect. The novel ends with questions that the characters themselves may never find answers to, why should we as the reader have something that they do not?

[Tracy O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flinty-eyed prose, with a view of the intimate and big questions about carving a life, especially one of inquiry.

[Madelynp · Rating 1 out of 5]

This isn't the worst book I've ever read (The Book of Joan still earns that honor), but I ended up hate-reading the last 60ish pages so that I could be done with it. The book either needed to be longer, so that Millares Young could more fully explore the themes of loss, culture, memory, and love, or it needed to be a novella that only looks at one of these themes. As it is, the author introduces heavy topics...and then doesn't do much with them.

I was excited about this book for a variety of reasons: I enjoy well-written prose about nature, a Latina anthropologist as the main character is awesome, and as a geologist, any book called Subduction is bound to be interesting. Unfortunately, the writing was awkward, with moments of beauty scattered throughout constant descriptions of rain (yes, yes, it's the Pacific Northwest in December, but reading about the patter of rainfall on a tin roof for the thirtieth time grows stale). Claudia as a main character was interesting: she is a complicated character. BUT while I understand the desire to lose oneself to your work, the way that she suddenly...flips?...after she learns she is pregnant is both unbelievable and obnoxious. I also felt that Millares Young was trying to give us an almost anthropological perspective of Claudia by using Peter to provide so much information about her throughout the story, but I instead found Peter's casual sexism to just make EVERYONE involved at the center of the story appear old-fashioned.

This book was so overwritten and under-edited that I cannot imagine ever reading anything by this author in the future.

[Mona Frazier · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book jacket interested me because this is a novel of a Latina anthropologist (Claudia) who retreats from Seattle to Neah Bay, a Native American whaling village in the Pacific Northwest coast. "Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of her guide, a spirited hoarder named Maggie. But when spurred by his mother's failing memory, Maggie's prodigal son Peter returns seeking answers to his father's murder."

The descriptive, literary writing is what captivates, especially in setting the scene. "The wrinkled gray water of Neah Bay rippled north from the Coast Guard dock and around Waadah Island, unfurling toward a container ship suspended in a line of fog that pierced the strait...The reservation's main drag was lined by low building and trailers, some proud and tidy, others boarded up, defiant."

The author can conjure a phrase so lovely I found myself wanting to highlight phrases (but being OCD about books, I did not). The characters are well rounded, unique and interesting. The pace was a little slow at times but this isn't unusual for literary reads.

Be aware that there are a couple of vivid sex scenes that might surprise or offend a reader if they don't expect or wish to read sex scenes.

I enjoyed the novel's examination of relationships, the Native community, who gets to tell the stories, the issues of grief and loss.

[Saira Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book to be difficult to get into, especially after reading two “contemporary” genre books written at grade 4 level that I sailed through despite my family interrupting me to ask what’s for dinner and other questions, in the weeks before picking this book up. I knew it would be formidable because I’ve heard the author speak, and she doesn’t mince words or shy away from unusual diction.

By page 27, I was hooked, having found the line to Kristen’s mindspell, the way she uses the words to convey meaning and get under the skin.
I had to use all my concentration- good practice for a mind used to sound bites - and I found it rewarding to hide from my family in utter silence, become immersed in Peter and Claudia, who I am convinced will find their way to each other, because their love scenes are so compelling despite being rapacious, violent, dense, despite having those qualities the love scenes are spellbinding and that’s how I know that they’ll make it. Even if they don’t they will always have those scenes of intimacy.

I related most to Maggie because she’s constantly cooking for her family, and willfully forgetting everything while preserving only song and dance. I also related to her because she changes the story when and how she sees fit - perfect!

This book is beautifully written and I admire the author’s generosity in making this for us.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subduction is a beautifully written novel of estrangement and the longing for belonging that so many of us carry throughout life. Claudia and Peter, the two central characters here, come from vastly different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds, but they are equally alienated and adrift. The Makah tribe beckons to both of them in different ways, but Claudia's mission to record the tribe's songs and secrets as an anthropologist inevitably brings her into contact and collision with Peter as he struggles to make peace with his own fractured history as the tribe's prodigal son. The result is a riveting relationship of desire and resistance, pushing and pulling: emotional and cultural subduction.
The language of this book is gorgeous, and there are some spellbinding sex scenes.

[Teresa Greenlees · Rating 5 out of 5]

lyric and haunting

[Mai Ling · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Subduction” takes you to one of the farthest corners of Washington state via a journey of self-redemption, regret, acceptance and forgiveness. So beautifully written, I rationed the pages to better take it all in – and of course to prevent the end, which is always too fast, too sudden. Maybe I’ve never physically been to Neah Bay, but author Kristen Millares Young’s prose is so powerful, I could almost feel the winter chill. And what rich culture, with stories and insights about the Makah Indian Tribe that I’m not sure I could ever have discovered on my own. All in the midst of a love story between two broken people and a family coming to terms with its dark history.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit I had to look up the word "subduction." It describes one of the ways that tectonic plates interact with each other, specifically when an oceanic plate runs into a continental plate, and slices under it, causing earthquakes and tsunamis, volcanos and landslides. The story in Kristen Millares Young's debut novel - of a Latina anthropologist working in a Native American community - beautifully illustrates the literary equivalent of those tectonic plates. Clashing cultures, family landslides, and fully developed characters who clash and crash. I loved this book!

[Sonja · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to really like this book when I read the reviews at the very beginning. I have to admit it was good but, at first, I thought the writing was a little choppy. And, in a couple of instances, she ended a chapter, or an incident, with a short sentence that left me wondering what she meant. Good characters, yes. It does show, that no matter what/who a person is, sometimes cultures just don't mesh for one reason or another. What I really enjoyed was the location of the story since I live in the state of WA and am familiar with the setting.

[Nicole McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beautiful in its vivid description of Pacific Northwest settings, in the struggles the characters face & how they realistically handle them, and in the way it explores the cultural art of storytelling. Who gets to tell some stories? What if stories need to be preserved when memory loss is on the line? How do you define outsiders?
Loved it and happy to have it on my shelf.

[BJ Bullert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subduction is a book I could not put down. Anyone interested in relationships between ‘researchers’ and their ‘subjects’ should read it. the next time I teach a course addressing the ethics of research methods, and participant/observation in particular, this book will be required reading.

[Sarah]

This book transported me to Neah Bay and I felt a part of the reservation. Young creatively taught me so much about the Makaw while entertaining me with the rich characters. I highly recommend this book!