Subduction

February 24, 2020
Young’s gutsy if circumscribed debut takes an outsider’s view of the Makah reservation on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Forty-year-old anthropologist Claudia flees Seattle after discovering her husband’s adultery with her sister, and returns to the whaling village of Neah Bay, where she’d previously collected songs and stories from the Makah. En route to “Indian Country,” she reflects on her childhood in Mexico and compares herself to previous well-meaning but flawed interlopers who came to Neah Bay in the previous two centuries. After arriving, she meets Peter, an underwater welder in his late 30s who is returning home after years away, and the two begin an affair. In passages alternating between Claudia’s and Peter’s points of view, Young highlights the tension of Claudia’s awkward presence in Neah Bay, as she encourages a woman to pose with a mask that doesn’t belong to her, and of Peter’s return to investigate the murder of his father. Claudia’s complicated romance with Peter, as they move at cross purposes, brings her relationship with the community to an impasse, and highlights the limits of her hope for belonging. While Young diligently explores questions about cultural appropriation, in the end her tale falls short by being all about Claudia.

February 15, 2020
In Young's lyrical and atmospheric debut, two damaged outsiders, estranged from their families and cultures, struggle to discover where they really belong. Fleeing Seattle after her husband leaves her for her younger sister, Mexican American anthropologist Claudia, distraught and humiliated, heads to the Makah reservation at Neah Bay, "an old whaling village on the northwest tip of the lower 48." She hopes to bury herself in work, interviewing Maggie, an elderly woman she had befriended the previous summer: "Maggie would give her what she wanted, would tell her things about spirit animals and songs that she wasn't supposed to reveal to anyone outside her family." But standing in her way is Maggie's son, Peter, who has returned home to care for his mother, newly diagnosed with dementia. Initially suspicious of Claudia, he realizes he can use her to tap into Maggie's failing memories about his father's murder. Likewise, by helping Peter sort through a trailer's worth of possessions Maggie has been saving for her son, Claudia can mitigate her guilt that she "was hustling a hoarder." As the two warily collaborate, their simmering mutual attraction explodes into violent passion, although Claudia fights to reclaim her anthropological distance. When she realizes that Maggie's hoard is not junk but gifts saved for a potlatch, or ceremonial feast, to be thrown for her son, Claudia breaks academic protocol by offering to assist with the invitations. Peter, still haunted by his father's death, resists reconciliation. Alternating between Claudia's and Peter's perspectives, the author creates moving portraits of two lonely, prickly people seeking to find their places in the world after so much pain and loss. Her lush, dense prose vividly captures the beauty of the Olympic Peninsula coast, but stylistic tics such as long, convoluted sentences slow the narrative, and abrupt transitions between the past and present sometimes confuse. Like life, not all the issues raised in this first novel are resolved.

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