While it's an interesting experiment - a book written like a möbius strip - it ultimately fails because of its poorly written female characters, who seem to lack compassion and understandable motivations, and its confusing and unsatisfying ending. I wanted to love this book, and I love some of it (the Sheperd part of the book in the center is especially powerful), but I can't recommend it to anyone except fans of experimental literary fiction.
I finished Mr. Peanut on the same day I watch Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience; an interesting coincidence considering both works feature a disjointed narrative structure. But where Soderbergh's film is a pretentious pastiche of bland dialogue spoken by equally bland characters, with the non-linear structure a necessary distraction (there's no way the story or characters (and I use those terms very loosely) could hold a viewer's attention for a straightforward 75 minutes), the structure of Adam Ross' novel adds new levels of meaning and suspense to the story.
Mr. Peanut tells the story of a man writing a novel and being investigated for murdering his wife. The narration moves between the man, the two detectives investigating him, and the novel he is writing. The narration moves so effortlessly between these points of view that you truly don't know the entirety of what's going on until the last few …
I finished Mr. Peanut on the same day I watch Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience; an interesting coincidence considering both works feature a disjointed narrative structure. But where Soderbergh's film is a pretentious pastiche of bland dialogue spoken by equally bland characters, with the non-linear structure a necessary distraction (there's no way the story or characters (and I use those terms very loosely) could hold a viewer's attention for a straightforward 75 minutes), the structure of Adam Ross' novel adds new levels of meaning and suspense to the story.
Mr. Peanut tells the story of a man writing a novel and being investigated for murdering his wife. The narration moves between the man, the two detectives investigating him, and the novel he is writing. The narration moves so effortlessly between these points of view that you truly don't know the entirety of what's going on until the last few pages. It is a mystery novel without an easily guessed ending and without the out-of-nowhere twist ending. The novel's one flaw is that it lingers too long on the story of one of the detectives and his marital history. But other than that, all the back cover blurbs ("Riveting...", "a diabolically intricate novel...", "an intellectual noir novel...") are 100% accurate.
