Book Review: The Minimalist by Kailee Pedersen
The Minimalist by Kailee Pedersen is an ambitious and unsettling novel that immediately caught my attention with its premise. Set within the insular world of classical music, the story follows Mia Voss, the final student of celebrated minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield. After Ryder’s unexpected death, Mia inherits his estate and, more significantly, his unfinished final composition, Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra. As Mia attempts to complete the work, she is forced to confront her complicated history with Ryder, her relationship with Ryder’s late son Oliver, and the guilt she carries surrounding Oliver’s suicide.
The subject matter is compelling. Pedersen brings together grief, artistic obsession, mental illness, identity, self-harm, suicide, and the complicated expectations placed upon artists. The novel’s examination of adoption and identity, particularly through Mia and Oliver’s shared experience as Asian American adoptees, adds another layer to an already psychologically complex story. The premise of an unfinished composition gradually exerting a disturbing influence over its creator is intriguing, and I found myself genuinely interested in where the story was going.
More than anything, I loved Pedersen’s prose. Her writing is beautiful, atmospheric, and intellectually engaging. There is a certain precision to the language that feels appropriate for a novel so deeply rooted in classical music and composition. The descriptions and internal observations create an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere, and there is a real sense of artistic disintegration developing beneath the surface.
Unfortunately, The Minimalist was also a difficult book for me to get into.
A significant factor was the first-person point of view. First person is simply not a perspective I enjoy reading, and in this case, the narrative distance, or lack thereof, made it more difficult for me to become engaged in Mia’s story. That is a matter of personal reading preference rather than a criticism of Pedersen's ability to write the character.
I also struggled with the lack of dialogue tags. There are passages in which it became difficult for me to determine who was speaking, and I occasionally had to stop and work backward through the conversation to establish the speaker. There are certainly writers who can make dialogue without traditional tags work well, but I have personally encountered very few who can do it convincingly. Cormac McCarthy comes to mind and stands as one of the rare examples where I find the technique effective. Here, however, it became a chore to decipher.
Because of these issues, I ultimately made the decision to put The Minimalist on pause rather than force myself through it. I have not finished the novel, so this is not a review of its conclusion or a judgment of the book as a whole. In fact, that distinction is important: there is enough here that I genuinely admire that I would like to return to it.
Sometimes a book simply arrives at the wrong moment—or runs into a reader's particular preferences in a way that makes it difficult to appreciate what is otherwise very well done. I suspect The Minimalist may be one of those books for me. The premise remains intriguing, and Pedersen's prose is strong enough that I would like to revisit the novel at another time. Maybe when I can set aside my resistance to first-person narration and allow myself to settle more fully into Mia's perspective.
For now, The Minimalist remains an unfinished read for me rather than a failed one. The distinction matters. There is a great deal of talent on the page, and the novel tackles difficult and complex subjects with considerable ambition. I simply wasn't able to get past the narrative choices.
I have not given up on it. I have simply placed it back on the shelf for another day.
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