COVER STORY

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

For When: Your wife is driving you nuts

by Char Vandermeer

Published: Jun 16, 2010


(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn't kill her himself. He dreamed of convenient acts of God." That's the ontologically uncertain bang that begins Adam Ross' Möbius-strip debut novel, Mr. Peanut.

Like the endlessly crawling ants on Escher's famous lithograph, Ross' book quickly captures its readers with short, tight, evocative sentences. An Escher-inspired computer game designer by day and aspiring novelist with visions of uxoricide by night, David weaves several versions of his marriage (and his wife's untimely demise) together so seamlessly that it's impossible to figure out where one reality begins and another ends. Did he kill Alice, his obese, self-obsessed, manic-depressive wife? Or didn't he? We're not really sure, and that's OK.

The deceptive simplicity that works so well with Escher's iconic images also serves Ross' story well. The beauty of David's narrative is that what's real and what's imagined is never entirely clear. It's this uncertainty, the way Ross loops beginnings into ends and back again, that is so effective.

But the pressure of two ungainly side plots deforms the skillful, looping conceit of the novel. In these interlocking, overly clever and comparatively clumsy storylines involving the officers investigating David's role (or lack thereof) in Alice's death, Ross rips the boundary between reality and perception and loses sight of which ants are crawling where.

Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95, June 22

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