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 ( )

Very descriptive, with characters and sex scenes too that feel real to me. Thanks for the read! ( )