Death by dieting isn’t necessarily a case of anorexia. In Adam Ross’s original yet perplexing debut novel, Mr. Peanut, a young wife is found murdered after she manages to lose more than 100 pounds. The murder weapon is a plate of peanuts, the number one suspect her heft-loving husband who swears he didn’t do it.
Over the course of their 13-year marriage, Alice Pepin had tried a Marquis de Sade arsenal of weight-loss machinery and restrictive diets. Whatever was offered up on late-night TV, Alice embraced and believed in its powers to relieve her of her burden of obesity.
Husband David urges her on, assembling the contraptions and engaging in endless conversations on minuscule movements of the arrow on the scale.
“There were pills and special sponges, protein shakes and magic reducing belts: the usual hokum, which he purchased for her willingly,” Ross writes. “With the machines, assembly was often required. And ultimately, David was called into the living room to Alice’s rescue where she would be sitting in the middle of a pile of locking screws, bolts, boards, wheels, and wrapped pieces of metal, the parts numbered and lettered (5Q,F9) spread in a circle around her as if she was ground zero.”
David, described as “a Jewish Henry VIII,” is a successful game designer, and while he obliges Alice her hope for transformation, he secretly counts the days until she falls off the wagon while fantasizing her death.
David wants freedom from the marriage, a chance to start over with a clean slate. What he gets are two of New York’s finest facing off in an elongated good-cop, bad-cop scenario that leaves the reader spinning. Mr. Peanut is a police procedural with a twist, lit with starbursts of psychological insight.
“We tell stories of other people’s marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. But can we tell the story of our own? If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.”
Both detectives are plagued with marriages they want out of. Ward Hastroll (whose name is an anagram for Lars Thorwald, Hitchcock’s wife killer in Rear Window) fantasizes an especially gruesome suffocation when his wife refuses to leave her bed for five months to illustrate how she has become invisible to him. Hastroll believes David is guilty.
The other detective, Sam Sheppard – yes, that Sam Sheppard — is dragged up from the dead to act as the cop who believes David is innocent just as he claimed it was an intruder who killed his wife. (Sheppard, an Ohio physician, was convicted in 1954 of murdering his pregnant wife, but was acquitted after a retrial 12 years later. The television show and film The Fugitive are said to be based on the case.)
Ross’s Sheppard is consumed by reliving the details of his marriage and its demise, and large chucks of the story are taken over with his musings.
The triple echoes of the restrictions and sacrifices of marriage are stifling, and at times it is the reader who wishes to escape the bonds. As suffocating as Alice’s offending peanut is the fact David is secretly writing a novel that begins with the same introductory sentence as Mr. Peanut.
But one cannot escape just how clever Ross is. From his riffs on Hitchcock movies to his obsession with M.C. Escher, to a murderous midget named Mobius who smacks home the message of the unrelenting nature of marriage, the novel is filled with “hobby horses” to get lost in.
Mr. Peanut is not for lazy readers or those who want their plot lines to unfold in a linear matter. For all its blathering, it has moments of brilliance that make one eager for Ross’s next book.
MR. PEANUT, by Adam Ross; 352 pp., Knopf, $25.95 (cloth); $22.50 (audio book); $15 (paper); $9.99 (e-book)