Mr. Peanut
author: Adam Ross
name: Paul
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2012/06/18
date added: 2012/06/19
shelves: novel
review:
Every once in a while I run across a book (or a movie, or game, or show, or album, etc) that even my hyper-opinionated mind just can’t seem to come to a consensus about. I’m at a loss in these moments, with my go-to analytical predilection fails and I’m left unsure what I think about something. Did I like it? Hate it? Perhaps I just didn’t understand it? Adam Ross‘s warped, layered and origami-like novel Mr. Peanut falls firmly into this category. I just don’t know what to make of it.
Indulge me, then, if you will, as I try to work through my confusion through review.
Mr. Peanut is about David and Alice Pepin, a long-married, childless couple living in New York City. David is a video game designer, head of a successful company and husband of Alice, a woman haunted by demons that have caused her to lose the battle with her self-control and her weight has begun spiking the scales into morbid obesity. Alice suffers from a myriad of food allergies, notably peanuts and early in the novel she appears to have died from ingesting a handful of Planters Peanuts. David is accused of murdering her, though he insists it was a suicide on her part. This seems unlikely to the investigating officers, Detectives Sheppard and Hastroll, who note that at the time of her death, Alice had lost hundreds of pounds, slimming down to a svelte 130, regaining her sense of beauty and self-confidence.
But the investigation into David opens wounds in Sheppard and Hastroll, both of whom have struggled with their own marriages. Thus begins the overlapping, layered narratives that pull parallels from strange, dreamlike free associations. Detective Sheppard is actually Sam Sheppard, former doctor and inmate, convicted in the fifties of bludgeoning his wife to death and supposedly struggling with the murderer (or murderers) who were never recovered. The case became the inspiration for The Fugitive and following the overturning of the conviction due to lack of evidence, Sheppard left his medical career to instead (I guess) pursue a career in law enforcement. Ross dissects the turbulent marriage between Sheppard and his wife, Marilyn, through the cold resignation of a bitter wife to a philandering husband, her own desire for revenge and closure or revelation.
Ross also delves into Hastroll’s union with his wife, who has at some point decided to confine herself to bed in some sort of test or trial or battle of wills that Hastroll must decipher or accept or comprehend. Sheppard and Hastroll may have their own baggage when it comes to marriage, but they still have to decide what role David Pepin played in Alice’s death. Then they discover the book that David is working on, a book called Mr. Peanut that becomes a meta-novel, part MacGuffin, part self-referential tool for Ross to weave his brazenly pretentious and ambitious structure around, trying to create the literary equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting—Escher in fact being oft-referenced in the novel.
There are stacks of meaning being applied here, with the parallels between the agonized, faithful resolve of Hastroll with his uncooperative boor of a wife, and Sheppard and his reactionary, revelatory adulterousness, his utter contempt and longing for the clarity of love and then David with his dual-nature, overlapping motivations and hazy, shifting persona. Each treatise on marriage and fidelity is woven around pop cultural reference touchstones, intentionally vague at times, maddeningly complete at others, always falling back on the curious parallels between the yin and yang of Escher’s mirror worlds, the works of Alfred Hitchcock, the time and place context of marriage in the “halcyon” days before feminism versus the enlightenment of modern times, the conflict at the core of monogamy and union that both must but also cannot on its own endure the ultimate erosion of time and routine.
In a way, trying to find the real plot inside Mr. Peanut is like trying to find the back side of a Möbius strip, and I can’t help but think this is intentional. Ross is really showing that the nature of marriage is conflict, and the interlocking plots that rest not just on top of but within and through each other as well are ancillary in a way to the treatment here of wedded bliss as anything but. Not that Ross seems to think of marriage as useless or foolish, he seems to genuinely be trying to sort out how the paradox of love that leads to commitment and then must transform into an ideally unending stream of compromise and negotiation, of which love is perhaps not even a real component (other than as a remembered facet in earlier decision-making). He tries to look for where the self fits in to the increasingly blurred entity that is the married couple, the swirl of him and her, me and you, I and us.
It’s weird because I don’t know that Ross ever succeeds in this, unless perhaps his only goal was to make it all the more confusing, to showcase how abstract and dizzying it really is. His choice of using Escher as a model seems apt until you realize that most of Escher’s work does resolve, to an extent. Eventually the birds blend into focus, wings and feathers no longer hinting at the rows of field and crops; the inverse true. The black gremlin and the white dancing man do finally shake hands. The stairs lead to somewhere. Mr. Peanut, though, I can’t say does resolve. Ross tries to split the difference by pulling a Clue (the movie)-like stunt at the end, a sort of Choose Your Own Finale that made me kind of resent him for leading me into this complex maze of piled translucency and then shrugging as if to say, “Well, I dunno either. You figure it out.”
Unlike other novels with disappointing ends, I didn’t dislike the direction or the destination in the closing pages, instead I revolted against his indulgence, his spineless decision to try to have his cake, eat it and come back for thirds. This is especially true because even with all this intentional contradiction, he neither unties the laces and displays the conviction to let them lie loose next to the shoe, nor does he do the reader the service of tying them up. Rather, they are half-knotted, dangling, a tripping hazard.
Admittedly, the book is gripping, thought-provoking, challenging and showcases a very, very talented writer. I don’t think you can ignore the enviable way Ross constructs his descriptions or arranges his ambitious structures. But, it’s not a flawless work. The long diversion into Sheppard’s case and past overstays its welcome. The introduction of the curious (and delightfully enigmatic) hitman, Mobius, is poorly handled. David Pepin’s character himself suffers from a lack of believability as he is a computer scientist and video game designer who doesn’t play video games; his malleable body is strangely unappealing in description yet (as with most self-insertion characters) commands sexual attention from secondary female characters. Some of the ways in which Ross characterizes women are uncomfortable not in specific instances but in totality, where they all come across as some flavor of cruelly manipulative, inscrutable just to be enigmatic and spitefully guarded.
Yet in a lot of ways I respect the novel, and I enjoyed the exercise of reading it, of following the path Ross lays out. There are sequences, such as the analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s work and his diagnosis of suspense and several of the conversations between Sheppard and Mobius that are breathtaking. There are also characters that are given the exact right amount of narrative exposure to make them cement in memory, like the man from the airline who comes to rescue David (and, by extension, Alice) following a harrowing experience en route to Hawaii, and the man who could be Sheppard’s brother, a simple house cleaner who harbors all manner of secrets and represents Marilyn’s possible door to a different life. There is also a strange lack of emotion present in a book that, maybe, ought to be ripe with pathos, as if Ross were slathering on complexity to keep not just the reader but also himself at arm’s length from the grim subjects and darker conclusions almost arrived upon.
In the end, my relationship with Mr. Peanut, the novel, is as twisting and conflicted as the Escher paintings the book fashions itself after. For every amorphous white blob there is an identical stain; for every point at which the horizon seems identifiable, there is a competing perspective that results in a book both wonderful and awful, both inspiring and disgusting. It is, then, both a triumph and a failure, something that results in me wanting to brush myself off, to retreat to less conflicted territory of YA science fiction or glib mystery novels. My final, perhaps only lucid takeaway is this: I can’t wait to see what else Adam Ross has to offer.