Peanut Allergy Kills Marriage Dead

Spoiler Alert!
The New York Times review of Adam Ross’s debut novel Mr. Peanut garnered my interest immediately. I was one of the fortunate firsts to reserve the Seattle Public Library’s brand new copy, and now I’ve finished reading it. The book seems to be an answer to my query about literary representations or challenges to the institution of marriage in contemporary American literature.

When I first began reading Ross’s novel, I thought the prose was dazzling, in spite of the fact that Mr. Peanut’s take on marriage is so twisted that I kept flipping to the back flap of the book jacket to re-assess the author bio-blurb which affirms that Ross is married. In a moment of readerly faux pas, I wondered if the book’s rendition of marriage represents in any way Ross’s own marital experience. All the husbands in the book fantasize, at some point, about murdering their wives… when the husbands are not off philandering, that is. All the wives in the book feel invisible and ignored and taken for granted. Now that I think about it, this is a pretty conventional take on marriage. Is this how far we’ve progressed in how we imagine traditional marriage? Adultery and unhappy housewives?

The form of the novel gestures at postmodern cleverness, but doesn’t quite achieve it. Still, I quite admire the efforts here. The plot folds in on itself like the Mobius strip that is so thematic. It begins as a conventional detective story with split frames: flashbacks to David and Alice’s marriage interspersed with police interrogation of David following Alice’s death. David is a video game designer; the plot flirts dangerously with the concept of the avatar, likening this alter-ego to the Escher tessellation of the white man and the black gnome. But David is also struggling to write a novel, a plot device—more of a gimmick actually—that feels inauthentic, even though, by the end, we learn that it is the very device that structures the entire novel. Resulting passages about the difficulty of writing through the long middle of the story, or overcoming writers’ block, or ignoring the interruptions of communal living, sound like Ross himself reflecting on the difficulty of finishing Mr. Peanut. Adam Ross and his alter-ego David Pepin could consult any women novelist, journalist or academic to learn how to finish a book despite constant interruptions by spouse, children, household management, and full- or part-time job.

And that brings me to one of my main critiques of the novel. The experience of marriage represented in the book is entirely that of the husband. Ross seems quite capable of creating fairly sensitive interiority for his male characters, but not for his female characters. If I had a nickel for every time one of the wives did or said something that was, from the narrator’s perspective, mysterious, cruel, impenetrable (yes, pun) or inscrutable… Like all the husbands in the book, the author is incapable of (and uninterested in?) unpacking female psychology. Meanwhile, the husbands all seem wounded, a little like Mr. Dombey, that jerk. And despite that these husbands are being jerks (they’re all potential wife-killers, remember?), the reader is sickly persuaded to sympathize with them. Why won’t Hastroll’s wife get out of bed? Why is Pepin’s wife so cold? Why does Sheppard’s wife run off to stay at her father’s house? Wives can be so mean.

On top of being husband-centric, the book is relentlessly heternormative. Not a single queer in the story. And it portrays marriage as an inevitability. As the Film Studies professor character announces to his undergraduate class, "'we're all criminals anyway, aren't we? You aren't yet, of course, because you're young and unmarried, whereas I've been married for years and regularly dream of murder!'"We are all either married or not-married-yet. The institution defines us, even in the negative. But isn’t fiction for imagining things that are not necessarily real yet? And by imagining them, and circulating these fictions and thereby transforming the readers’ perceptions and beliefs, doesn’t fiction help change how things are? Adam Ross, you’ve let me down. But maybe my expectations of realist/domestic novels are too high to begin with. (Ok, speculative fiction, I'll give you another chance.) While this book confirms for me that heterosexual marital failure remains standard literary fare, I want to further explore contemporary American fictions of marriage: where are the literary challenges to the legal institution? Where is the great and groundbreaking Gay Marriage Novel, for example?

More than anything, the book expresses the sadness and absurdity that marriage entails--surely this depiction signifies the imminent demise of the institution? The book re-kills the fantasy of the soul mate. Towards the end of the book, it occurs to the main character "that you could be married to any number of people, that you were simply trading on what you were willing to give and take, on whatever good came with the bad. And it was also a sad truth that you might not be equipped for certain kinds of ease or happiness." This cannot be a revelation to most of us.

In closing, it's getting towards bedtime, and I identified with this particular example of dazzling prose:

Hannah needed her sleep--eight solid hours--and she protected it fiercely, was in a bad, bad way if it was interfered with; if she stayed up too late the deprivation wrote a check that irritability cashed the next day.