At first glance, Jeffrey Cohen's debut novel is a crime drama. As the title suggests, murder is the central event, and the novel, like many others in this genre, delivers the backstory leading up to the crime, as well as the legal aftermath. The killer, Frederick Builder, is a retail manager at an iconic Philadelphia department store, Chanet's. He's an aspiring author, greedy but lazy, looking for that easy route to the bookstore shelves. The victim, Mindi Quintana, is an ex-girlfriend of his, the editor of a small literary magazine. He believes she can be his ticket to fulfillment, both literary and personal. Disgusted with his natural gift for organizing china displays and his success as a retailer, he pursues Mindi and writing with awkward ineffectiveness, until the death of one becomes his hope for the life of the other.
The strength of this book is the first half, when the relationship between Frederick and Mindi is developed. The depth of the characters and the complexity of the situation goes way beyond what I expect from a book in this genre. This is not a novel about an obviously creepy freak, brilliantly caught and handily brought to justice. This is a novel about a regular guy, who might be sitting next to you on the bus. We spend a lot of time with Freddy as he descends to the point where murder is possible. He starts out as a reasonable, likeable guy. At the moment the murder happens, we can almost kind of understand. It's not a book about how far a human will go, but how close atrocity really is to us every day.
Cohen's book is least interesting when it is raising sort of indignant questions about the media making celebrities of criminals. Yes, Frederick Builder gains fame and notoriety after he is "discovered" by the media and yes, that's kind of a shitty byproduct of our celebrity culture, but the topic feels kinda done to me. When the book gets outraged and starts laying out accusations that the victim is now being raped by the media... yeah, that's a little sonorous for me.
What makes this book kind of awesome is the way it violates genre expectations, not just in developing strange characters and the different point of view windows we get, but in the landscape itself, which is quite surreal and interesting. The book would make a great Terry Gilliam movie, in fact it clearly recalls the movie Brazil, with the corporate structure of Chanet's in particular referencing the bureaucracy of the "Ministry of Information." There was also a deep and inarticulate longing within the characters that felt familiar in a Terry Gilliam kind of way, not quite so much in the more polemical second half, but powerfully interesting in the first. It felt a bit like Christmas in July sometimes, as in the middle of this courtroom drama I'd get a gift of a literary passage worthy of a very different kind of novel. Had Cohen taken more time to round out the second half of book, left more space for his obvious gift as a literary writer, and backed off his mission to reveal the badness of idolizing criminals, this might have been a great book.
As it turns out, The Killing of Mindi Quintana is not a crime novel exactly. But it's a surprisingly entertaining read, left me with a lot to enjoy in terms of inventive situations and interesting landscapes (the inner workings of the department store, Chanet's, in particular will be hard to forget), and made me very curious to see what Cohen will come up with next. Definitely a writer to watch.
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