Adam Ross' debut novel "Mr. Peanut" is available at Buffalo Street Books. Image provided
FOR ALL THE SHORTCOMINGS OF MR. PEANUT, Adam Ross exhibits enough writerly prowess in his debut novel to pique my curiosity about what he’ll attempt to pull off in the future. And, Mr. Peanut is going to make a great movie; it is so vivid that it begs to be made into a feature film. Typical scenes would probably include main character David Pepin, a successful video game designer in despair, running through the streets of New York looking for his wife; long wide moving panning shots of dangerous cliffsides and turbulent oceans in Hawaii; Dr. Sheppard awkwardly banging his young colleague in the front seat of his sports car; closeups of Alice’s face as she chokes on the peanuts she’s deathly allergic to; and finally the multiple, overlapping dramatic conclusions, one of which includes the crash-and-smash of the great blue whale at the Museum of Natural History.
It is easy to read this book as a pop work that would make a nice midbrow movie, and of course, Ross’ pop references, which serve to frame the book’s self-conscious twists and turns, are obvious and abundant: artist Escher, video games, Hitchcock, and the book’s namesake, Mr. Peanut himself. Writing for the New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn describes the book as “a kind of postmodern fun house, filled with distorted reflections of pop culture icons.” Indeed, the length and breadth of stylistic tricks employed by Mr. Ross indicate loftier literary aims, further evidenced by a mention of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities toward the novel’s end, which David is reading as a young man in college just before he meets his future wife Alice.
Critical perspective on this novel has been focused on the message that it’s about marriage; Stephen King blurbed the book and named it the most riveting look at the dark side of marriage since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (He even went so far as to claim that it gave him nightmares, “no mean feat,” he wrote.) Certainly on the surface marriage seems to be the preoccupation of the plot, as six of the main characters are three couples that comprise three murderous husbands and three victim wives. The structure seems to move in a series of interlocking circles, each one dropping into the next by way of an association within the plot: for example, we move from the story of David and Alice, who are living in contemporary Manhattan, into the story of Hastroll, one of the detectives investigating Alice’s murder case, and his depressed wife Hannah, into the story of Sam and Marilyn, which is based on the real-life 1950s July 4 murder of a doctor’s wife; her husband was charged, convicted, later retried on the grounds that he didn’t receive a fair trial, and finally acquitted. (I regret that we never get to see the insides of any kind of marriage including Mobius, the over-the-top bastion of unexplained “pure evil” who inexplicably becomes obsessed with David and Alice, despite David’s apparent protestations and attempts to cut off contact with him.)
Critics seem to concur that the story of Sam and Marilyn is by far the most eloquent and compelling section of the book, and as it forms the center of the structure, it propels the reader forward into the latter third of the novel; I fully agree with this. From there, the narrative spirals back out into a series of plausible endings for the story of David and Alice. Some of these take place within the context of the book David is writing about his marriage with Alice, which begins with the same lines of the “outer” book that we are reading: “When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed of acts of God.” By the end of the novel, the boundaries between the novel we started in which David is a character, and the novel we’re drawn into, which David is writing, become appropriately blurred, and now the reference to Escher’s hand drawing itself is almost insultingly flagrant.
This is all very appealing; Ross clearly understands how to hook readers and launch them into a complicated story with multiple plot lines. He can keep the momentum churning long and strong enough to propel them all the way through to the end, “no mean feat” indeed, in and of itself. But by the finale of the book, as the reader is catapulted between various endings which may or may not be “actually” happening (as opposed to happening in “David’s book,”) the cracks start to show, and the thing starts to groan under the weight of its own aspirations.
I mentioned David’s apparent protestations in regards to Mobius: this is a large part of the problem. Throughout the novel, we don’t really know David’s “true” motivations – or if he even has them. In a nice line, we’re told that although he was successful at everything he tried to do, it was as if his life hadn’t occurred to him. Are we to read him as an aloof literary character of Adam Ross, or as the quasi-literary near-sociopathic avatar of David Pepin? I suppose the answer is “both” – the effect of a double image, like when you print two negatives on top of each other in darkroom. But the problem in this case is that neither image is particularly interesting, and once compounded and multiplied against each other, the vapid effect is amplified to the point of near inanity.
It’s easy to manipulate the “outcomes” of superficial characters; they can be made to do almost anything because the psychological groundwork hasn’t been laid to launch them in any particular direction. Sure, Alice might die or be murdered in any number of ways, she might commit suicide, be the victim of tragedy, and so on. In the end, the reader is not likely to be all that invested in her character, so any emotional or visceral response to the story is blunted at best. But nor are we left in a sublime state of the surreal or the weird, marveling at Ross’ masterful literary trickery and wondering how did he do that? We might have been, but someone decided to include in the narrative the clues for how to associate the different the parts of the novel to each other, so ostensibly, by the time we reach the end of the text, it all seems to add up just fine.
I was left wondering if the explanatory subheadings and mallet-on-the-head obviousness of some of the concluding passages was the work of a meddling editor too dim to see the potential of leaving some loose ends open for the imagination to work on. I’m reminded of Mulholland Drive or Donnie Darko, narrative works that successfully looped and bent their plot lines in on themselves. In these instances, we’re not totally sure how the different parts are working together, and although convincing theories have been proposed, it ultimately seems a trifle irrelevant to attempt to impose an absolute grammar on these works. The reason these are successful is because they release us from the dictatorial rule of ration, of absolute linear story lines, of fixed time-space relationships. For some of us this induces relief and excitement, for others anxiety and exasperation, but Ross’ willingness to just hand over the keys to explain the discrepancies in his multiple plot lines suddenly make the entire work seem trite. As a reader, this isn’t where you want to find yourself at the finish line of a book that you have tremendously enjoyed.
Ross has, of course, provided ample thematic justification, or at least correspondence, to this tendency to “plug up all the holes”: in video games, when the player finds the final clues, he ultimately unlocks the whole game, leaving no mystery unturned. And, in the case of a Mobius strip, referenced by the so-named character, there is a mathematical certainty that under certain specific circumstances, one can walk in a straight line, never deviating, and end up “upside down,” or “on the other side.”
But if it is supposed to all add up, then how to explain the lingering inconsistencies and imbalances? Why is the compelling storyline of Hastroll and Hannah completely dropped, never explored or resolved? Why does that of Sam and Marilyn become so big, so nuanced, and so magnificent that it ultimately overwhelms that of David and Alice? How did Sheppard become a New York detective after being a doctor with a family in Ohio? Why does Mobius care so much about David and Alice that he continues to try to murder her against David’s wishes, and why does he know all the details about Sheppard’s case? (I know, I know, he’s supposed to represent “pure evil” … but this, too, seems a little too neat and not all that interesting.)
Disproportion can also be found in the excruciating portrayal of the difficulties of mature marriages. In the first two couples, we see men who are needy and vulnerable reaching out to women who are cold, emotionally unavailable, mentally deranged, reduced to physical drives of eating and fucking, and borderline abusive in their capacities to utterly ignore every and any need and request of their husbands. This turns a classic crime noir portrayal topsy-turvy, that of a cold unavailable male and a swooning needy female. Only Marilyn emerges as a female character who cares for her husband, but who ignores her own needs and desires to do so. She is a saintly female who turns the other cheek against Sam’s infidelities, however much she internally suffers as she does so. But ultimately, all the women are the victims of actual or imagined homicide, and all the men implicated by their own murderous fantasies.
This perspective on marriage is undeniably one-sided, and so the book is really more about marriage from the perspective of a specific kind of male gaze than it is about “the dark side of marriage” more generally. Furthermore, all these marriages seem to only be transpiring on a surface level. Although the characters’ emotional responses to each other seem genuine, and the book is riddled with insights on both the absurdity and the heartfelt sincerity with which spouses interact, there lacks a deeper meaning or nuptial intention to act as an anchor or a foundation for any of these marriages, the gel that keeps people together during identity crises, infidelities, and mental illnesses.
People get married for all kinds of reasons, but they often stay married because of family devotion, religious affiliations, the desire to practice virtue, or even the desire to cultivate something lasting in a temporal world of constantly fleeting phenomenon. None of this exists in the world of Mr. Peanut, and during the most overwrought emotional scenes between David and Alice, and Hastroll and Hannah as well, it is hard not to wonder about what, exactly, is keeping them together. Sure, some people stay married out of inertia or because they are locked into a pattern of mutual sadism, but this isn’t the mid-20th century when people got married at 18 and stayed married due to social convention, then woke up 30 years later absolutely hating each other but stuck with each other ‘til the bitter end. That’s the world of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and that kind of torment seems outdated in a world where marriages break up at any life phase and for any reason.
Curiously, the most compelling marriage in Mr. Peanut is the one that transpires in the mid-1950s; in comparison, the contemporary marriage of David and Alice looks more like a simulation marriage, the sparring avatars of a video game in a cyber universe of postmodern illusions. I suppose that was the intention. But the result feels unbalanced, the experience feels less like the enigmatic mathematical harmony of walking a Mobius strip and more like watching a game of chess in which the pieces inexplicably disappear as the game is being played, and then just as mysteriously return all at once in their final positions; Game Over. As I was denied both the experience of a witnessing the masterful creation of an airtight unified whole in terms of plot and the wonderment of masterful enigmatic fracturing, I closed the book feeling empty, wondering what the ultimate point of it was, and frustrated that the ending wasn’t handled with a bit more skill.
Still, I concede a few points. One is that the book may be read outside the realm of psychological realism as a pop work and as such gains permission to be as superficial as it wants to be. Another is that Adam Ross is undeniably a gifted writer, and I fully appreciate the significance of his effort. Although questions of conscience are absent from the characters’ considerations, Ross’ choice of subject matter explores the difficulties of marital devotion; these are the real problems of many people from all walks of life. There were many moments when his terse storytelling technique enraptured me, specifically during the wonderfully creepy plane ride scene when he and Alice travel to Hawaii, the ensuing Kauai hiking scenes, and later, the scenes leading up to the epiphany Dr. Sheppard experiences while travelling in California with his mistress Susan. The aspirations of this novel are refreshing and its successes uplifting; with a style that is both arty and accessible, Ross can reach a wide range of readers. Last, the book is just plain well-written, which is increasingly rare in contemporary fiction. I salute Ross for his clean, spare style and carefully chosen words, as well as his direct sentences, vivid images, and crisp syntax; linguistically, there is no fluff or empty padding here. In a literary world where titles are more apt to be “everything insipid, unbelievably wordy, and utterly pretentious,” it’s exciting to see the emergence of Mr. Peanut as a rejuvenating alternative.
Danielle Winterton is a frequent contributor to The Ithaca Post and a co-founding editor of Essays & Fictions. She agrees with author Stephen Wright, who said that any book review reveals more about the writer of the review than it does about the book under discussion.