The Perk - Mark Gimenez

Law is back at the centre of Mark Gimenez’s latest novel, when Chicago lawyer Beck Hardin packs up his career after the death of his wife and moves back home with his kids to small town life in Texas. A lot has changed in the twenty-four years since he left, and when Beck finds himself appointed judge of Friedericksburg, a small town founded on old German values, he runs up against the town’s elders and their inability to deal with modern issues of race, land and politics. The whole corrupt set-up is exposed through two main cases - a violent race attack by the town’s high-school sports star on a young Mexican boy, and the unsolved death of a sixteen year-old beauty queen, the daughter of an old friend of Beck’s.

Despite the shock opening prologue – rather hastily described, but certainly achieving an immediate impact – The Perk settles down into an entirely different kind of pace from the high-octane action-movie machismo of Gimenez’s previous novel The Abduction. The more mundane everyday concerns here rather match the pace of small town life in Texas, as the writer himself no doubt revisits his own home background. That personal experience would account for the accuracy of world he describes and there is surprisingly a lot of humour here.

The apparent easy-going pace of The Perk and life in Friedericksburg is however deceptive. Once Gimenez delves beneath the surface, the novel’s purpose is revealed as a powerful study of the American obsession for “the perks” of fame, the extreme lengths people are willing to go to in order to achieve it, the shortcuts young people will take in order to escape suffocating small town life, and the dangers that come with it. Everything has its price and fame and success can be bought, but there is also a terrible human cost that people are unwilling to acknowledge, or willing to forego.

Gimenez captures that also in Beck’s private life, in his relationship with his family, his father and his dead wife, building up a frightening picture of American society today. The novel also has a relevant point to make about how government can run roughshod over law and justice when it suits their agenda. The novel loses sight of these strong themes a little towards the end however with awkward attempts to stage a few surprises, and the whole package is wrapped up far too neatly, but for the most part this is another strong novel from Gimenez.