Subduction
By Kristen Millares Young
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?