Mr. Peanut (Vintage Contemporaries)

Adam Ross has got some fierce writing skills. The man can write, no two ways about it. There's a point fairly early on in Mr Peanut where he hits his stride, and for about the next 100 pages, he delivers some of the best material I've read in quite some time. I was fully prepared to polish up that fifth star. And then, for no apparent reason, quite bafflingly, Mr Peanut started to slide, eventually skidding out of control completely, leaving me very disappointed. With a sense of frustration that an author with such obvious talent should spiral out of control so abysmally. It prompts the same question as so many other overtly 'literary' first novels -- what in God's name do editors do these days? Isn't a major part of their job supposed to be to save gifted authors from themselves?Ross can write vividly, and with great insight. It appears, however, that he has difficulty in knowing when to stop. This book is reminiscent of a different product spokesperson - it just keeps going and going and going, looping back on itself like one of the main protagonist's beloved Escher drawings. By the time it's all over the reader is left feeling like the unfortunate Marilyn Sheppard, that is, with the sense of having been bludgeoned repeatedly around the head with a blunt instrument until any possible whimper of protest has been silenced.OK. I'm exaggerating slightly. But it depresses me that a writer as obviously smart as Adam Ross would choose to screw up what could have been a brilliant first novel by dragging in one lame postmodern gimmick after another. As the story opens, David and Alice Pepin's marriage is coming to a dramatic end, brought about by Alice's fatal anaphylactic reaction to ingesting the peanut mentioned in the title. Did she succumb to a bout of suicidal depression, or was it ... MURDER.... at the hands of the strangely detached David? Police detectives Ward Hastroll and Sam Sheppard are very interested in speaking with the grieving widower. As the author starts in on the series of flashbacks exploring the couple's marriage and how they reached that opening tableau, things seem to be proceeding along entirely conventional lines.So naturally it must be time to dip in to our bag of grubby used postmodern gimmicks .... drumroll, please ..... ah, yes - it's the trusty "story within a story" device. See, it turns out that the circumstances of Alice's death correspond in every detail to the plot of the book that David's been working on for lo these many months. The fog of doubt enters the reader's brain (on its little cat feet) - OMG! Is what we are reading the true account of what actually happens? Or are we reading the story within the story? I'm sooooo konfused.Fine. So the author seems to feel it necessary to jazz up his story with this entirely superfluous narrative gimmick. He wouldn't be the first. Auster, Borges, Flann O'Brien ... this trick goes all the way back to Cervantes. It doesn't add a whole lot, but it's relatively harmless. A minor annoyance. But, unfortunately, the shenanigans don't stop there. Apparently not just one, but both, detectives investigating the case have marital problems of their own. So the exploration of the Pepins' marriage is repeatedly interrupted by digressions whose inclusion is simply bewildering. The slow foundering of the relationship between Alice and David is mirrored by a (frankly implausible) impasse between Detective Hastroll and his wife, who just pulls a Bartleby one fine morning and refuses to get out of bed. For the next eight weeks. Subsequent developments are not good, and Ross wastes a good 30 or 40 pages in serving up this ridiculous subplot.As you roll your eyes and try to ignore the sheer irrelevant vapidity of this digression, things suddenly get infinitely worse. Does the name of the second detective, Sam Sheppard, ring a bell? Why, yes. Detective Sheppard is none other than the infamous Doctor Sam Sheppard, Cleveland's 1950s version of O.J. Simpson, found guilty of brutally bludgeoning his beautiful pregnant wife, Marilyn, to death in 1954. After 10 years in jail, his conviction was overturned on appeal, but he never really recovered, and died in 1970.Sam Sheppard was a real person (widely believed to have been the inspiration for "The Fugitive"). By the time Alice meets her anaphylactic end, he has been dead for about 40 years. So his resurrection as Detective Sheppard in Mr Peanut is an obvious artifice, introduced for the sole purpose of allowing Adam Ross to indulge in a further digression, specifically a lengthy, highly detailed reimagination of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Marilyn Sheppard. This indulgence goes on for approximately 100 pages (hard to judge exactly on the Kindle). Nobody at Knopf seems to have questioned the reasoning behind dragging in this huge chunk of fundamentally extraneous material, on a topic that's already received more than its fair share of attention.Assorted other tropes are deployed, not always to good effect. There's the sinister Mr Mobius, who (you'll never guess) keeps reappearing at various stages throughout the narrative, exuding a kind of Hannibal Lecter-ish menace, as he bargains with "Detective" Sheppard to see portions of David's manuscript. Then there's David's fascination with Mobius strips and Escher prints, loaded with symbolic import. It's a bit sophomoric, but in the scheme of things these are minor annoyances.What pulls this whole mess back from the brink is this: Ross's examination of the marital difficulties of his fictional couple, Alice and David, is astoundingly good. So is his reimagination of the inner life of the Sheppards; it's intuitive and astute to the point of being a very convincing interpretation of the available data. (The interlude involving Hastroll's marriage is just an embarrassment, from start to finish).The real problem may be that Ross doesn't have much confidence in his own ability. His account of the foundering marriage of Alice and David is extraordinary. The book he should have written would be about half as long as Mr Peanut and remain focused on this central relationship. It could have been brilliant. Instead he has given us this inferior bloated mess, in which he tries much too hard and sabotages himself at every step.Nevertheless, I strongly recommend that you read Mr Peanut, despite its multiple flaws. Because when he isn't shooting himself in the foot, Adam Ross writes astonishingly well. You will never again think about marriage in the same way.

Mr. Peanut is a story within a couple of other stories. The story that takes place in present day New York, is that of David Pepin's. David is a computer game designer and his wife Alice teaches troubled children. They've got plenty of money but they are unable to have children of their own and they are as unhappy as a couple can be. Unhappy, times ten. She is obese, obsessed with dieting even though David seems to like her fat, and deathly allergic to peanuts. The two are so at odds with each other, that David spends hours fantasizing about her death. Killing her himself, to be more specific. So when Alice ingests peanuts and dies from anaphylactic shock, is it an accident? Did David have something to do with her death?The second and third story, revolve around the two detectives investigating Alice's death. One detective, Ward Hastroll, has his own marital issues. His wife Hannah has been bedridden for six months for no apparent reason. When he is not investigating the case, he is home with her, tempting her and trying to lure her out of bed. The other detective is Sam Sheppard who bears the name of a philandering osteopath from the 195o's that murdered his pregnant wife, Marilyn. Much of the book is spent telling the story of the Sheppard from the 1950′s and at times, I found this story line to be more interesting than David's, but how it plays out and why it's even mentioned is totally bizarre to me.As you can tell, this book is not your typical police procedural. In fact, it was difficult to tell what was going on at any given point in time since David's profession as a game designer, often leads you to believe that he is fantasizing about something or dreaming up subplots in his head. In addition to the game designing gig, he is also writing a novel so when you read Mr. Peanut, you're not sure if Ross the author is telling the story, or if David has somehow come to life, hijacked the story and run away with it.This might seem like a total cluster-F of a story and in a lot of ways, it is but I enjoyed it immensely. It's entertaining to read about screwed-up people and these folks have issues. Their hatred for one another has no boundaries and you end up not liking any of them, but somehow I was okay with that. Their daily interaction mimics (precisely, I might add) what a long married couple experiences daily. The numerous annoyances that make you bristle practically leap off the page, but most people don't take it to the next level and fantasize about killing their significant other. Do they? That's what makes this one so rich.BUT, and there is a little BUT. If you expect this to be a cut and dry police procedural you are barking up the wrong tree. You won't find that here. You will find yourself completely absorbed with the problems of one couple, only to be rudely shifted to the problems of a different couple. The jerking back and forth is both welcome and jarring. Almost the entire story is told by the males involved, which gives it a lopsided feel and the investigation is all over the place. From the start, you have little confidence that these two detectives will figure it out and in the end, there are numerous alternate endings that leave the true ending up to the reader.If you appreciate a unique story, written in a non-traditional way, that may or may not be poking fun at the sanctity of marriage, then you will enjoy this book. When reading it, I didn't want to stop and when I HAD to stop, all I wanted to do was pick it up again. It's a book to be read in the moment, without picking it apart to figure out the whys. Just read it.

The book was OK, but it's not for all. Ross was very straight forward. He didn't sugarcoat marriage and its difficulties in the book, however, I found it's a little hard to follow the book.