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    Mr. Peanut
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    Mr. Peanut
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    Mr. Peanut
    Audiobook13 hours

    Mr. Peanut

    Written by Adam Ross

    Narrated by Mark Deakins

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After thirteen years of marriage, he still can't imagine a remotely happy life without her-yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect.

    The detectives investigating Alice's suspicious death have plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife.

    Still, these men are in the business of figuring things out, even as Pepin's role in Alice's death grows ever more confounding when they link him to a highly unusual hit man called Mobius. Like the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games David designs for a living, these complex, interlocking dramas are structurally and emotionally intense, subtle, and intriguing; they brilliantly explore the warring impulses of affection and hatred, and pose a host of arresting questions. Is it possible to know anyone fully, completely? Are murder and marriage two sides of the same coin, each endlessly recycling into the other? And what, in the end, is the truth about love?

    Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation of the relentlessly mysterious human heart-and a first novel of the highest order.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 22, 2010
    ISBN9780307736161
    Unavailable
    Mr. Peanut
    Author

    Adam Ross

    ADAM ROSS was born and raised in New York City. As a child actor, he appeared in movies, commercials and television shows. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Washington University, where he studied with Richard Dillard, Stanley Elkin, and William Gass. His first novel, Mr. Peanut, was critically acclaimed and has sold in 13 countries. Ladies and Gentlemen is his second book. Ross lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and two daughters.

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    Reviews for Mr. Peanut

    3/5

    263 ratings36 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I’ve been struggling with what to say about this one. “Mr. Peanut” is an ambitious book by Adam Ross. I feel like I can sense the grand endeavor he was going for - this book is a non-linear, not-strictly-realistic look at 3 marriages from the male perspective. To that end, I will say that one would not be likely to set this author up with their sister, based on this book alone. It is quite a grim view, to say the least. On the flip side, there were two absolutely uncanny coincidences in which parts of the story paralleled my own life, and that threw me for a loop. Another unexpected side effect of reading this book was the thought and conversations it led to on what makes a good relationship and how horribly the characters in the book got it wrong.
    • 2/5
      I won't say this book was a waste of time, but after finishing it today I'm just . . . confused. There were so many side issues and subplots, by the time I hit "The End" I didn't understand the ending at all, or what any of it meant.

      The narrative is all over the place, time-wise, so I was never really sure where any given section fit in the whole of the story.

      There's sex. A LOT of sex. At one point I was thinking this book was written so the author could write about sex.

      I'm glad I finished it, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
    • 3/5
      This is the story of the investigation of the murder of Alice Pepin. The prime suspect is he husband David, who has a known history of fantasizing about her death. As you explore the motives of the crime you will also look into the troubled marriages of the two investigating detectives. A book about love, hate, resentment and revenge.
    • 2/5
      Three more miserable marriages would be hard to find; women are invariably portrayed negatively and unsympathetically; the use of obesity as some kind of symbolic marker for psychological health is off-putting; the whole insertion of an entirely different story smack in the middle makes no sense; and you can't tell when you're reading the story or one of the characters fantasies about the story. There's little to like. The author managed to create sense of suspense (although then ruins it by including a lecture defining it!) which was enough to get me to finish the book. I was so happy to be able to put it away.
    • 1/5
      This was the stupidest book I have ever wasted time reading!! And I read the whole thing hoping for something to start or maybe it would have a great ending but noooo it just ended. The story had no point or purpose.
    • 4/5
      Audible. Now this is a weirdly wonderful and troubling book. Too often overt nods to the likes of Italo Calvino and Escher are sure signs that a book will be tedious and full of self-importance. This books manages to be playful, fun but also troubling and even weirdly hopeful. Begins with the voice of a husband fantasizing about killing his wife. Weaves back and forth in time. Turns out the husband is writing a book and eventually we discover that the first sentence of his book is the first sentence of Mr. Peanut. Things become increasing difficult to tie down. The wife eventually dies (maybe?) by eating a peanut (lethal allergies). Is it murder? Is it suicide? Detectives turn out to be a man also fantasizing about killing his wife and Sam Shepherd the famous maybe wife killer from the 50s. The middle of the book is a very good telling of the story of Shepherd and his wife. Definitely from a male point of view. Women just don't make sense in this book. But I was increasingly fascinated as I listened. And not disappointed through the end (or multiple endings, you choose) of the book.
    • 3/5
      This....is a very weird book. At times I couldn't wait to be done with it. The long digression into the Sam Shepard case made sense thematically, yet dragged and didn't work narratively. I don't know. I'm giving it three stars because Adam Ross is obviously talented and inventive. Although I am awfully glad not to be married to him.
    • 4/5
      I am going to simply plagarize and re-quote what another review said because it was so right on:

      "For a first time author, this is an extremely ambitious book. Full of misdirection, suspense and mystery. The book has some pretty profound things to say about human companionship and marriage.

      I was left remembering that our own lives are made up of the banal. That if you can't appreciate the boring tedium of everyday life with someone then you can't really appreciate them at all. Life is not full of excitement and passion. Well, sometimes it is. But if you live constantly trying to create drama or excitement in your relationships you'll never by happy.

      "'The middle is long and hard'"

      Never the less, the book is a scorcher. Ross has really tried to make an impressive piece of art. While some elements are lacking, its impossible to not be impressed with the sheer balls (balls being the right term, this is a supremely male-voiced book to be sure) it takes to write something like this."

      Well worth the effort to get through a few of the "middle spots". At the end I was so glad I didn't give up to the "banal".
    • 4/5
      Finishing this darn book kept me up most of the night and I still can't coherently tell you whether I loved it or hated it.
    • 3/5
      Not my usual genre to read, however, this was an extraordinary story of murder and mayhem that I really enjoyed. I think I was impressed with the handling of Ross's use of surrealism threaded through the book, from tropes of men feeling tiny in the company of women, imagining women larger than men, alluding to some of womens' powers, and mens' weanesses; to father abandonment issues as fear of family leadership, and mother and child deaths as anxiety over losing the sensitive mother side in the male child, bludgeoning of dogs, humans, imaginary and real...so very disturbing in parts, so very insightful in others. His handling of culture classes was informative from his standpoint as well, for example, how he voiced middle, lower, and upper classMEN, their specific issues of shame, pride, and reflections of themselves to themselves and their women.

      While some may feel the female characters not fleshed out as much as the males, I think Ross made a point with that, mostly because he told a TYPE of story, the story of marital complexities from the perspective of men; his use of surrealism was descriptive of men who do NOT understand women, and whose issues about prowess and control are issues of great anxieties. I began to find myself wondering if I really knew MY husband. A good entertaining read.
    • 2/5
      The promised brilliance escaped me. I guess I ended up being stuck on an Escher down-staircase that never seemed to go up. If you share Bret Easton Ellis' views on love and equality, you'll probably get something out of Mr. Peanut. Otherwise, I would counsel staying away.
    • 2/5
      It is with great reluctance that I'm giving this book two stars, rather than one. The second star reflects only the potential that Adam Ross shows as a writer, and is NOT reflective of anything he actually achieved with this book. I saw the briefest flashes of greatness in the prose, only to be followed by pages upon pages of intellectual and authorial darkness.Anyone interested in reading this book should know that Mr. Ross has taken a real-life crime (one that will likely be instantly recognizable to true crime buffs) and inserted it into what makes up the vast majority of this book. It is the case of Dr. Sam Sheppard, who was convicted of killing his wife Marilyn in 1954, and whose conviction was overturned ten years later. While the real-life Sam Sheppard died many years ago, Mr. Ross re-creates him as a character who has lived on to become a police detective, investigating the death of the character David Pepin's wife, Alice. Alice is found dead after having eaten - or been forced to eat - peanuts, to which she is highly allergic. Detective Sheppard has a partner in Ward Hastroll, whose wife Hannah has taken to her bed for never-explained reasons as a passive-aggressive way to torment Ward. The theme of unfaithful (in spirit or in actuality) husbands who are desirous of killing their wives weighs heavily on all three of these principal characters.The use of Dr. Sam Sheppard's real life case felt, at best, lazy, disingenuous and disjointed to me. Mr. Ross takes copious liberties with the facts of the real-life case in his story, but this didn't come as much of a surprise to me for a couple of reasons: the author is entitled to a certain liberty with the facts, having clearly transformed Sheppard into a *character*, and the author writes his other characters in such an exaggerated fashion that the reader is required to suspend more disbelief than anyone could deem reasonable. Characters in Mr. Ross' debut novel do things that make no sense whatsoever, are never remotely explained and behave in ways that are inconsistent even with the reality Ross has created for them. There's a lot more I could say about this book, but there's a passage near the end that sums it up best, for me. The author resorts to a flashback of David and Alice in a "Hitchcock & Marriage" film class, where the reader is treated to THE FULL LECTURE from the professor as a device to explain the plot of the novel. You can almost hear Ross congratulating himself on how clever he must've thought this to be. Meanwhile, my eyes rolled so far to the back of my head that I wasn't sure they'd ever face front, again. This book is full of muddled storylines (each with some potential, but never even remotely realized) and repugnant characters all around. If this is what constitutes innovative, amazing fiction today, then it shows just how lazy we've all become. What a waste.
    • 3/5
      I don't know how to rate this book. I both admired and hated it. The misogyny oozed from almost every page, and the characters seemed to get great pleasure from the violence, actual or imagined, against the women they claimed to love.

      I suspect that the fractured narrative structure, which I thought was very well done, simply obscured a story I would not have finished reading if it had been told chronologically. But, on the other hand, there was something fascinating about the story.... We're going to be discussing this book at the Odyssey Bookshop later this spring. Hopefully the discussion will help me figure out more about my conflicting reactions to the novel.
    • 3/5
      [Edit: I've thought about this book, and my possibly over-harsh review, on and off for a few months, and decided I was probably too rough on it. What Mr. Ross set out to achieve was enormously difficult; and had he fully succeeded, would have been a phenomenal achievement. It was my disappointment at finding that he did not entirely realize the potential of his ambition that left me a bit bitter at the end. Nonetheless, he made a grand play at pushing the envelope of crime-novel convention, and deserves applause for setting himself such a high goal...even if, like Icarus, he somewhat petered out at the end :-]

      Mr. Peanut was terrible. I'm not going to bother writing a proper review, because it doesn't merit one.

      I can't imagine recommending this book to anyone except, perhaps, someone who was particularly obsessed with the murder case of Dr. Sam Sheppard (subject of the film and TV series "The Fugitive") and demanded to delve into every bit of pop memorabilia and literary trivia which touched on that legacy, however convoluted, wretched, or pointless.

      I reach this conclusion with bitter and somewhat bewildered disappointment, because there were so many early signs that I *ought* to have liked this book. It describes itself as featuring the recursive tessellations and non-Euclidean twists of Escher prints and Mobius bands (an Escher print is reproduced within the book and repeatedly referenced by the text, and a major character is actually named Mobius). Like The Rehearsal, this was a book-within-a-book, where the ends (significant plural) twist around and rejoin at the beginning, so that it's not always clear at any given moment whether you're reading text or metatext. The chronology is completely scrambled, although that isn't really so impressive a trick -- toss any manuscript into the air and you'll achieve a similar effect, likely with more effective ordering than Mr. Ross managed.

      But beyond literary pun and games, this novel really should have spoken to me. It actually included a lengthy description of how Piers Anthony's early novel Split Infinity could be implemented as a WoW-type MMORPG, and My God, if that doesn't place me smack in the (extremely small) target audience, then nothing does (read it twice in 5th grade alone, and bought a reprint last Christmas for my 14yr-old son). I also dug the detailed review of Hitchcock's cinematography.

      For those reasons, and others, I really tried to like this book. I tried hard, but the unhappy truth is that...it's rubbish. Potentially interesting subplots & themes just abandoned and left unexplained. Massive, unjustified, uninteresting, and irrelevant shifts in point-of-view that carry on for such lengths you forget which book you're reading. Consistently unlikeable characters for whom you simply can't be bothered to root. A precocious and trite choose-your-own-ending scarcely conceals the pitifully stark evasion of resolution. Long stretches that are simply and mind-bogglingly boring (didn't this guy have an editor?)

      I'm sorry, but this was dreadful, pretentious trash.
    • 2/5
      Incredibly convoluted. Almost didn't make it through.

      Makes a guy never to even think about getting married.
    • 3/5
      Can marriage save your life, or is it just the beginning of a long double homicide?David Pepin has fantasized about killing his wife for some time, long enough to even have written a manuscript about it. Then she is found dead and it's unclear whether she committed suicide or was murdered, and David is naturally the prime suspect. The two investigating detectives have marital problems of their own. Hastroll's wife has retired to her bed and refused to explain why and the other detective is Sam Sheppard, the man The Fugitive is loosely based on, who served time for the murder of his pregnant wife, but who later had his conviction overturned.This book felt misogynistic to me, with every female character consumed with a silent dissatisfaction they are unwilling to articulate to their increasingly desperate and concerned husbands. Marilyn Sheppard is the only woman whose point of view we get to see and she is entirely consumed by her husband's untidiness and infidelity. She doesn't have agency outside of reacting to his activities. (I now understand why so many reviewers fell over themselves to praise Jonathan Franzen's ability to "write women". After this book, I'm inclined to do the same.) That said, there was much that was interesting about this book. Ross takes many scenes and repeats them from different points of view, and even from the same character's point of view. In a less able writer's hands, this might be boring, but I found these scenes to form the most interesting parts of Mr. Peanut. And the long section detailing the days leading up to Marilyn Sheppard's murder was fascinating, especially the scenes told from both spouses' points of view. In them, Ross vividly demonstrates how one person can be happy in a relationship and convinced it has never been stronger, while the other person is inarticulate with despair. This is the author's first full length novel and it shows quite a bit of promise, if he can get a handle on writing women as people, rather than adjuncts and impediments.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Peanut started out with a great premise, and interesting plot. Did the main character's wife commit suicide by eating a plateful of peanuts (she had a severe peanut allergy), or did the husband kill her my forcing the peanuts down her throat. Great hook. The problem for me was when they kept veering off tangents concerning different characters. I felt it got too wordy and convoluted. It comes back to the main storyline in the end.
    • 3/5
      Good in parts, but most peculiar - couldn't figure out what it was all about. Thought the author was trying to be too clever by half.
    • 4/5
      A rather incredible book that is very difficult to sum up. There's a novel within the novel; a fictionalised account of the case of Dr Sam Sheppard (the inspiration for The Fugitive); a seminar on Hitchcock; an airline's angelic 'fixer'; a nightmarish hike; and much more besides. The different tales of troubled marriages - which all touch on what seems to be the universal urge to kill one's wife - don't really fit together, but everything is written with such brilliance that I can't wait for Mr Ross to release something else. Equally at home with sex and gore, domestic drudgery and the glorious surrounds of Hawaii, he's got it all - except a sense of restraint. Now that he's thrown the kitchen sink at his debut novel, the rest should be even better.
    • 4/5
      “When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn't kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.”Yes, marriage is no picnic, there are going to be dark times, right along with the happy ones, but the picture this author paints, is pretty damn bleak. The book opens, with David Pepin being investigated for killing his wife. It also focuses on the detectives and their unhappy marriages and running parallel to this, is a fictionalized account of the infamous Sam Shepard case, from the 50s, where a doctor was convicted of murdering his “perfect” wife. Not many sunny moments here.Ross is a talented writer, his prose is crisp and strong, his characters are well-crafted, which completely frustrates me, that the story doesn’t pull together in a more satisfying way. Some readers found this book incredible, I’m just not one of them.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Peanut is a deceptive piece of work, on the one hand we are reading a domestic drama of a wife, Alice Pepin, dying from an allergic reaction to peanuts. But did this wife commit suicide or were the peanuts forced into her mouth and rammed down her throat by her husband? The two police detectives must work this out, but they also have domestic issues of their own. One, Ward Hastroll, has a wife that has taken herself to bed and left him to figure out why and how to get her back up again. The other detective is Sam Sheppard, yes, the Sheppard of the famous murder case. The author, Adam Ross, details this murder for our consideration - Did he do it or was he just another victim?And what about Alice’s husband, David? He appears to be deeply in love with his wife, yet he often dreams up different ways to kill her. Is this a normal preoccupation of most married men, or is he deeply disturbed and about to act upon his fantasy? More questions than answers arise with each turned page. What about the private investigator, Mr. Mobius, hired by David, but apparently working his own agenda. Lastly what about David’s book, who does write the ending?A interesting concept, this dark look at marriage raises many questions to ponder upon . Does love always come with a flip side of hate? Do we ever really know our mates? How can we ever fit together when women are intuitive, always seeing various shades of grey, whereas men are more pragmatic, seeing black and white with very little in between.I can’t say I loved this book, I found it an uncomfortable read, yet I do believe Mr. Peanut is a book that will stay with me due to the riveting way the author presents his dark and disturbing subject matter. Squirm inducing yet gripping.
    • 5/5
      David and Alice Pepin’s marriage is falling apart. When Alice is found dead, David is the prime suspect. The two detectives assigned to the case have their own problems with their wives. Detective Ward Hastroll’s wife has taken to her bed and refuses to leave it and Detective Sam Sheppard was convicted of killing his own wife several years ago and then later exonerated.This book was fabulous. It’s hard to get too much into the plot without giving something away but the twists took my breath away and left my head spinning. It’s really three books in one – David and Alice’s story, Sam’s story (which is based on the true story of Sam Sheppard, the real life man that The Fugitive is based on) and a little primer on Alfred Hitchcock and his movies. This book is like a Twilight Zone episode or Alfred Hitchcock movie. It’s the kind of book that I immediately wanted to reread once I finished it because I knew I would catch so much more the second time through.I highly recommend this book to everyone. Fans of Fight Club, Alfred Hitchcock movies or The Fifth Element will especially love it.
    • 4/5
      The theme of this novel, superficially, is that everyone wants to murder his/her spouse. (I'm giving Ross the benefit of the doubt here in that all three of his protagonists are male and all have wanted at the very least to murder their wives; some may well have done it.) What varying emotions, bright and dark, simmer in the intimacy of any long term relationship is one of the mysteries at the heart of this novel. But it's its form that makes it challenging and unusual, maybe even postmodern. Like Cunningham's "The Hours", there are two fictional stories running side by side with a third, fictionally adapted from real life. The last is the story of Sam Sheppard, a surgeon convicted of killing his wife (and on whose story "The Fugitive", TV series and movie, was based). Though his conviction was overturned ten years later, he never became a New York City detective, which is what this three-part story makes him out to be. He is investigating the protagonist's wife's death by peanut (allergy) and whether or not Pepin did it, is never made quite clear. The introduction of a wholly fictitious character with the giveaway name Mobius tells us that we are in the Paul-Auster world of self-referential ploys and dogged investigations whose solutions are more literary than deductive. One function of Mobius is to extract from Sheppard--and even a narrative point of view (though 3rd person) from Sheppard's long-dead wife--a very realistic (yet obviously fictive, since none of the participants in that night's drama could've--nor did--tell Ross anything) story of the night of her death.So the purpose? Ross has Pepin say it himself: there is nothing that couldn't happen in that pressure cooker we call marriage but in the face of love--what the Hastroll story is about (though it has very specific echoes of Hitchcock's "Rear Window", self-referentially, the subject of the college class where Pepin and his wife met years ago)--nothing very likely will, whatever we fantasize or write about (Pepin, like Adam Ross, is writing a novel about a man killing his wife, a fact that makes him appear unusually guilty).Difficult at times but Ross is a writer capable of vivid sense of place--the whole Hawaii section is photographically etched in my mind. Definitely worth the read, as long as you don't need ends tied up cleanly.
    • 3/5
      This is a cleverly written novel without a soul. David Pepin, a game designer, may or may not have killed his wife, Alice. Alice herself is an unstable piece of work. There's a shadowy wife-killer for hire named Mobius. The two investigating detectives have had wife problems. One is Dr. Sam Sheppard, convicted in 1954 of killing his wife in Ohio, a conviction that was later overturned. He's now a Detective-Surgeon (whatever that is) investigating homicides in New York. The other detective's wife recently spent months in bed for no apparent reason. Mr. Peanut is a grandly conceived story that's actually kind of a cold-hearted mess.
    • 4/5
      If you like noirish, non-linear mindbenders like Memento and Pi, you may enjoy Mr. Peanut. I certainly did, although I can't say I'd recommend the book to any of my friends, since I suspect most of them would object to the wistfully examined theme of wife-murder.The core of this book - if it can be called a core, since the novel is structured like a Möbius strip - is the story of the troubled marriage of David and Alice David Pepin. At the start of the novel, Alice is dead, with a peanut lodged in her throat. Accident, suicide, or murder? The story of their marriage is unveiled in flashbacks: Alice is mourning a series of miscarriages and has become morbidly obese. David is writing a novel about a man named David who may or may not have murdered his wife Alice, but he is paralyzed by writer's block. A detective investigating Alice's death has his own bizarre marital problems. Another detective, Sam Sheppard, was acccused of murdering his wife (yes, that Sam Sheppard).If you like the films of Hitchcock, as Ross obviously does, you may have fun picking out the references as you read. One of the characters is named after the actress who played Miss Torso in Rear Window. Pretty cool.Oh, and the asinine review in Entertainment Weekly, which said that Mr Peanut "fails completely as a police procedural." No duh. That's not what it is.
    • 3/5
      At the beginning I thought it was going to be a very good psychological thriller, but I think Ross was trying to be too clever for his own good. The different themes and the MC Escher device detracted from what could have been very compelling stories. And the two endings were a cop-out .
    • 2/5
      Very complicated. I hung in there waiting for all the ends to be tied up but it never really happened. I finished it feeling annoyed and unsatisfied.
    • 4/5
      The book was creative and it would have worked better as 3 separate novellas. Ross was creative in everything he did but it was as if he created great ingrediants but they didn't work together. He never connected the situations of the detectives to Pepin(the lead character) except that they all had issues with their marriages. That was a bit too simplistic. The Sam Shepherd part was way too much of the book and given the time problems(1954 verus present day) it made no sense unless you thought way too much about it. And afterall I ultimately don't want to work that hard. That being said, I did enjoy the read and I would read another book by Ross. I just don't think he did a good job of putting all of the parts together. The theme about marriage and its' difficulties was evident but so okay and as other readers have mentioned the view came almost solely from the male point of view. I also didn't really connect or like the Pepins who led very elitist lives and never seemed to be able to understand their own issues. However, you can see the author's creativity and I would be willing to read a new book by him. This one just didn't totally work for me.
    • 3/5
      The parts that were good were really, really good and the parts that were not were really, really not. The story tells about three different couples. The most interesting couple was only about 5% of the book, the least interesting couple was 70% of the book, and the one that was obviously what the story was supposed to be mainly about was only about 25% of the book. And to make it even more confusing, the author gave the book two different endings! (I think he was making an attempt to copy-cat "Atonement" with that idea.)
    • 3/5
      Don't get married, girls. Your husband will want to kill you.