This is KUOW's book club, and we just read through the first half of Kristen Millares Young's debut novel "Subduction." I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell. Let's get into it.
I'm just a reader, standing in front of Claudia, asking her to chill out .
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To recap, briefly: Claudia, one of our main characters, is a Latina anthropologist who has traveled to the Makah Nation in Neah Bay to continue her work with an elderly Makah woman named Maggie. Maggie is in the throes of dementia when her son Peter, our other main character, reappears. Peter is haunted by the murder of his father. Claudia is haunted by her husband's affair with her own sister. Neither deals with their pain in an especially healthy way, but Claudia is dealing with it by taking what isn't hers: Maggie's stories, memories, and songs.
I'm jumping right in with a quote:
Later, on page 81, Peter describes Claudia's approach as "a buzzard's circle," a beautiful metaphor that perfectly captures what she's up to — and lets us, the readers, know Peter can see through her. The thing Claudia may not yet realize is that Maggie seems to know what she's doing, too, at least in part.
Just consider how Maggie changes some slight, yet important details as she tells them both an old Makah story about Thunderbird. She says Blue Jay sends the trickster Kwa-Ti to bring him the Blackberry Bird's daughter. Peter informs the reader that it's actually Salmonberry Bird's daughter in the story from his childhood, and he's quite sure his mother knows this as well as he does. It's hard to imagine Maggie has become confused. Perhaps she is willfully holding back from Claudia, someone she compares to Kwa-Ti in passing.
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To be fair, Peter is no great hero either — though I find myself more sympathetic toward him as he works to find his way back in his own home, all while grappling with some rather brutal memories of his father's death (am I the only one slightly confused by the flashbacks?). The way he treats sleeping with Claudia almost as inevitable, and I suppose he was right, reveals his less likable qualities and something darker under the surface.
This quote seems to capture just how tortured he is, though:
And he is needed, of course. Maggie needs him. Claudia needs him, albeit to get what she wants out of Maggie. And the memory of his father needs him.
Through Peter, we get a complicated vision of his father as both someone who brought Peter great joy as a child and someone who brought strife to their home. Perhaps he's still doing the latter.
Frankly, I can't see anything good coming from Claudia's presence, not unless she gets her ethical house in order. But I'm very curious to see how she'll be able to help Peter, Maggie, and the readers piece together what happened to Peter's father. The bloody flashbacks to his father on the floor of the trailer, the dreamlike scene on the skiff, the reference to Dave feeling bad when he "went missing" — I've been reeled in by the mystery here, and I'm hungry for more clarity. I get the sense Peter is, too.
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One small update to our reading and newsletter schedule: You should still finish the book by July 29 if you want to read my analysis that day without encountering spoilers. But you won't get my interview with Kristen Millares Young that same day — I know, I'm sorry! I will be interviewing Young (more on that later). It will just come out later that week.
All I can say right now is we're working on some exciting new things with the book club.
Don't forget to send me your thoughts as we continue to read "Subduction." You can email me directly at kcampbell@kuow.org . Plus, our newsletter subscribers can vote for our September pick over the next few weeks. Sign up here!
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