Take my wife. Please!

Mr. Peanut

by Adam Ross

2010

About halfway through Mr. Peanut a mysterious hitman named Mobius remarks to the detective investigating a murder that he hates movies.

"What do you hate about them?"

"They're overdetermined."

"Meaning what?"

"In a movie, everything means something. If a man says, 'That tank's filled with compressed air. If you're not careful, it will be explode,' then you know that at some point the tank will explode."

This incarcerated man seems far cleverer than his profession might suggest; he psychoanalyzes his questioner as part of some quid pro quo wherein the detective relives the torturous details of his wife's murder. Mobius's interest in the detective's painful past lies in the case's subsequent prosecution; the detective himself was ultimately accused of his wife's murder and the case was never resolved. Mobius agrees to provide information about the detective's case for the truth of his culpability in his wife's death.

It's true that in film, an inherently visual medium, objects take on a nearly mythological significance and seemingly casual plot points are almost always returned to later in the story to explain away a narrative inconvenience or to enhance the plot.

Filmgoers sense this relationship between upfront foreshadowing and subtler deus ex machina, which leads many of them to cleverly whisper anticipated plot points in each others' ears during screenings. "I bet that her cell phone is going to die since she left the charger on her table," etc.

It seems Mobius's complaint is taking issue with Chekhov's oft-quoted axiom (and frequently erroneously attributed to Alfred Hitchcock) that if there is a gun in act one, then it must go off by act three.

In good films, particularly thrillers like those by Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah or David Fincher, one eagerly anticipates the revelation of each bit of narrative trickery as one is exhilarated by the completion of a jigsaw puzzle, where each piece seems so clearly and suddenly to fit but seems also to strike you as so clearly obvious that it always belonged there. Or better put, when these narrative plans pay off, it seems both inevitable and surprising. And eminently satisfying.

Novels, with their tendency to fetishize the minutiae of daily life and the human psyche, do not seem to fall prey to the convenience of Chekhov's Gun as easily as films do. And yet when Mobius voices this complaint, it strikes a nerve awfully close to home.

After all, in Mr. Peanut every man wants his wife dead.

Mobius is being questioned in the death of Alice Pepin, discovered in her apartment dead from an allergic reaction to a can of the eponymous legumes. The detective (remember, similarly accused of uxoricide) alleges that her husband Alan forced her to eat the peanuts and the husband claims she has committed suicide by ingesting the forbidden food.

Ross uses the book to trace and re-trace the relationship Alan and Alice had with each other and themselves in search of the truth: who in fact killed her? Significant detours are permitted for both of the detectives investigating the crime, the aforementioned one (based on the infamous case of Sam Sheppard) whose wife was in fact murdered and the other who fantasizes of murdering his bedridden spouse.

At a certain point, it starts to become too convenient that every male character in the book is engaged in wife-killing. It starts to have the same weight of significance that movies suffer from in Mobius's estimation.

Other facts in the novel seem to smack of the same taste of convenience. The character Mobius seems pulled out of one of Alan Pepin's videogames (he designs them) based on the work of M.C. Escher. Alice's troubles with food and weight gain seem to shed thematic light around her masticatory demise. Numerous allusions to Hitchcock films are eventually followed by towards book's end by a veritable dissertation on his films:

"Next, stairs. Stairs are always significant in Hitchcock's films. A character's decision to make an ascent reflects a central moral choice, a commitment, a willingness to endanger himself or herself for someone beloved, a literal and figurative striving for higher ground. And mirrors. He uses them to suggest doubleness, and this symbol becomes even ore fraught when his work turns darker during his later films, so mirrors in Notorious mean something very different from mirrors in Vertigo or Frenzy."

Ross's digression on Hitch becomes nearly condescending as he ventures in the theme of marriage in the films and the concept of the MacGuffin; one begins to wonder whether or not Ross is explaining to the reader the MacGuffin as a sly wink (an "I know you know") or as a pedagogical device ("Let me explain how my book works and blow your mind").

For by now an astute reader would have determined that the peanut-assisted suicide/murder in chapter one was in fact a MacGuffin, that convenient plot device Hitchcock pioneered as a means to draw a viewer into a plot and provide immediate expository motivation for the characters.

The peanut, and by extension the endless ruminations on spouse-killing, proves to be a MacGuffin as it eventually tapers off in interest for the characters, the reader and the author. Ross employs this narrative sleight-of-hand to redirect the reader to the tribulations of marriage. The book eventually becomes an exploration of how difficult it is to share one's life with another and the constant self-sacrifice required in this effort.

Alice Pepin becomes less a murder victim than a woman in danger of losing herself to marriage, of being engulfed by joint identity. There follow a number of pieces of very poignant writing. One can't help as a reader but be aware of the book's bait-and-switch, though, and during the middle of the book it seems to lose a lot of momentum and as pleasantly as the thing is written, one becomes restless.

This restlessness leads to incredulousness at some of the plot developments (Sam Sheppard's presence as a character, despite the complete chronological illogic) and then inevitably to irritation.

As all good suspense movies do in the end, though Mr. Peanut delivers in a twist ending that seems entirely a cheat but simultaneously and completely reasonable, eve tidy, explanation for all of the reader's cumulative dissatisfaction. Just like those movies Mobius complains of, everything turns out to have meant something after all and the pieces of Mr. Peanut fall neatly, infuriatingly, into place and leave behind a soundly constructed, morbid little puzzle.