Synopsis:
As the last and greatest student of famed minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield, Mia Voss has long been assured a rise to prominence in the insular world of classical music. When Ryder dies unexpectedly, she inherits everything–including the unfinished manuscript of his final composition, the mysterious Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra.
Haunted by memories of her tragic romance with Ryder’s late son, Oliver―like Mia, an Asian American adoptee―Mia leaves her girlfriend behind and returns to Ryder’s home to finish his last work. While there to untangle her complex relationship with Ryder, who hid his Jewish and gay identities to become one of the most important twentieth-century American composers, Mia must also contend with her lingering guilt over Oliver’s suicide and her own musical ambition as the manuscript begins to exert a disturbing, mesmerizing hold over her.
Review:
Kailee Pedersen’s psychologically excruciating “The Minimalist,” is a melodic, gothic descent into madness, a melancholic, quiet recital played with bloodied hands which swells in grotesque crescendos that will make your jaw drop and ears ring. A meditation on what it is to be an artist, the costs that may come with creation, the politics of ambition, the violence of perfectionism and the danger of obsession, bordering on self-cannibalisation, Pedersen’s latest is a self-destructive-Abromavitchesque unravelling for fans of “Black Swan,” and “The Piano Teacher.” A smart and surreal “coming-apart,” story “The Minimalist,” will make your molars ache and your head spin, Pedersen’s gorgeous but grim prose dancing, spinning, skidding across the damned thing’s pages, every paragraph another movement to Ryder Wakefield’s Death Fugue. This malicious earworm of a novel is out from St Martin’s Press August 18th.
We follow Mia Voss, 35, a classical music composer in her own right, who drops everything, including her girlfriend, when she hears the news that renowned composer Ryder Wakefield, her mentor, has died. She returns to the house in which she was essentially raised, left to her alongside Wakefield’s unfinished “death fugue,” a challenge, a burden, which she must now complete herself. She reminisces upon her complicated relationship with Ryder, her even more complicated relationship with his son Oliver, her relationship with her own identity as a queer Asian American adoptee, and with her craft- it seems like Death Fugue is requiring her to give a lot of herself over to it.
Pedersen’s writing of this novel in many ways mirrors the arrangement of a minimalist piece. The content of the novel is looping and repetitive in format, overlapping and repeating again in a manner that is almost unbearable. Whilst the language itself is so beautiful it might almost obscure the brutality lurking beneath it, almost, structurally, this is an intense, emotional slow burn almost like no other, an oscillating low note that thrums and reverberates with the horror of what Mia might do. A discordant motif, a refrain that asks the reader not simply to witness obsession but experience it for themselves. “The Minimalist,” is also overflowing with Pedersen’s own knowledge of classical music, and whilst readers may initially find this to be a little inaccessible, but I found in the end this detail made the characters truly feel like experts, genuine artists who live and breathe their crafts, and Mia Voss’ psychological rollercoaster all the more real. It was also rather fun to be introduced to Carlos Gesualdo, a famed composer Mia is very much a fan of, who in 1590 murdered his wife and her lover, a macabre piece of music history for you there.
“The Minimalist,” perhaps ultimately though, is a meditation upon identity. Mia is a composer, and a lover of classical music, and that without doubt forms a small part of her identity, just as being a rabid horror fan forms a small part of my own, we are all mosaics of passions and histories that together resemble a self, but her obsession with completing death fugue quickly begins to consume and subsume her entirely. There is a world of difference between devoting yourself to art and allowing art to devour everything else that you are. Mia is an Asian American adoptee, an aspect of herself that she does not interrogate so much- she does not have the same longing to understand where she came from as Oliver, who wanted answers. Ryder, gay, a part of himself he hid due to the attitudes at the time, and Jewish, something he later tried to reclaim through music is a parallel to Mia, another life shaped by the delicate balance between identity and performance.
A novel that walks the line between artistic brilliance and complete self-annihilation with bleeding feet, Kailee Pedersen’s sophomore novel is as rich as it is devastating and elegant as it is grimace-worthy. Hypnotic and nauseating, “The Minimalist,” is a sophisticated piece of psychological horror and an utter triumph.
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