Death Match By SCOTT TUROW

Death Match By SCOTT TUROW

MR. PEANUT

By Adam Ross

335 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95

     “When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.” So begins “Mr. Peanut,” the daring, arresting first novel by Adam Ross, an author of prodigious talent, which takes as its theme “the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.”

     David and Alice Pepin have been married 13 years and are far past the blushing romance of their university days. “The middle,” Pepin tells his wife, “is long and hard,” an observation this book repeatedly makes about dieting, novel-­writing and marriage itself. Alice, who teaches troubled children, is clinically depressed and has grown desperately obese. Her shape pleases her husband, but her obsessive diets do not, and their consistent failures belabor the Pepins’ life together. Partly in consequence, David, a successful computer game designer, is often engrossed in fantasies of Alice’s death, sometimes by his own hand. When Alice dies with David’s fingers in her mouth, as well as a handful of peanuts, to which she is deathly allergic, he claims it was suicide, while the police think murder.

     At that point, the novel grows more deliberately odd. Pepin’s case is investigated by two detectives who are well acquainted with marital difficulties. One of them, Ward Hastroll, has a wife, Hannah, who has not gotten out of bed for five months, driving him, too, to vivid fantasies of murder. Hastroll’s name is an anagram for “Lars Thorwald,” the wife-killing villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (a movie the Pepins studied in the class where they met), and his actions sometimes mimic those of Hitchcock’s character.

     The other detective is Sam Shepard, the real-life Ohio osteopath whose legal case became a landmark when he was convicted and later exonerated of the murder of his wife, Marilyn. In another long-ago class, the Pepins also learned about Sheppard’s case, commonly thought to be the basis for the “Fugitive” television series and movie.

     The detectives’ investigation leads them to Mobius, a pint-size professional wife-killer whom they suspect Pepin hired. Mobius’s very name, of course, invokes the inescapable repetitiveness of marriage, which can kill off relationships by inhibiting any opportunity for change.

     As this brief summary suggests, “Mr. Peanut” requires considerable decoding. This can be annoying, a little like going to a dinner party where all the guests seem bright and amiable but insist on speaking another language. Yet over all, the novel is an enormous success — forceful and involving, often deeply stirring and always impressively original.

     Nearly 40 years ago I was a fellow at the Creative Writing Center at Stanford. The director, Richard P. Scowcroft, who had helped his revered friend Wallace Stegner establish the program, told those of us in the advanced fiction seminar that the one subject he had always feared writing a novel about was marriage, because it still seemed to him the most complex and frequently unfathomable of human relationships, notwithstanding his own long and successful marriage. Scowcroft’s remark is a testimonial to Ross’s bravery. In many ways it would have taken less courage to present a sympathetic portrait of Osama bin Laden than it did to write this novel, which flouts the treasured conceptions of love and marriage many of us depend on to make it through the day. “Mr. Peanut” is most harrowing in its bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that often passes for a marriage, with each partner holding the other responsible for his or her deepest unhappiness.

     The point of view in this novel is overwhelmingly male. Except for about 20 pages from Marilyn Shepard’s perspective, we see only through the husbands’ eyes, which may account for why marital dissatisfaction is so often associated here with dangerous rage. The wives, in fact, all tend to be withholding. Each couple’s problems are peculiar, naturally, but in their own way familiar. Sam Sheppard philanders. Hannah Hastroll feels invisible to her husband. David and Alice Pepin have lost their connection in their heartbreaking failure to have a child. But in each relationship too much or too little has been said or done for so long that the partners blunder along in an oblivion of mute and tortured dissatisfaction, each marriage a game of blindman’s buff in which the partners occasionally long for each other but grope about, arms outstretched, eyes unseeing.

     It is only because of the book’s unflinching honesty about the perils of marriage that we can celebrate and credit the hope it eventually offers. All three husbands ultimately recognize a pathway to marital happiness. “If he could feel her want,” one reasons, “if he could prove to her that he’d always be there to feel it, then they’d be complete.” It is no small thing that Ross has dedicated this novel to his wife.

     “Mr. Peanut” takes risks not only with its subject but also with its form. The novel is shape-shifting, inhabiting several planes of reality. In this it draws its inspiration from M. C. Escher, whose optical illusion “Encounter” is reproduced on the novel’s title page. In Escher’s print, the positive and negative spaces of a room’s wallpaper merge indecipherably into a circle of black and white figures dancing toward confrontation. These tricks of perspective mirror life, Ross seems to say. “The person in your mind isn’t the person in the world,” David Pepin remarks, nor, for that matter, is your partner, whom you inevitably view through the lens of your own projections, idealizations and fantasies.

     Escher also inspires some of David’s video games and, more important, a novel he is writing on the sly. When lines from the book are eventually disclosed, they prove to be the same as those we have already encountered in “Mr. Peanut,” including its opening. The question of whether Ross’s book and Pepin’s are one and the same lingers, unanswered, but the device serves to potent effect when “Mr. Peanut” concludes with three (or is it four?) alternate endings, each entirely plausible and together suggesting the way any marriage wavers between potential outcomes.

     Yet Ross’s sliding-scale approach to reality doesn’t always work. “Mr. Peanut” is often comically grotesque — David’s first hit computer game, “Bang You’re Dead!,” envisions school shootings — and frequently magical, as when Mobius appears. Elsewhere, an implausible expert in “transportational psychology” turns up to offer Yoda-like counsel to Pepin in the midst of a disaster-marred vacation with Alice. But the novel is grounded in its realistic moments, especially by its intense vision of the characters’ inner worlds, which affectingly resemble our own. The high point, perhaps, is Ross’s sensuous reimagining of the Sheppards’ marriage and Marilyn’s murder, which occupies more than a third of the book.

     Going back to my days in Scowcroft’s seminar, I have taken it as an article of faith that a novel fully transports us only when it presents a coherent imagined world. Pigs may fly or authors may interrupt their own stories, but the ground rules must be consistent so that readers may step confidently outside of themselves for a while and, as the book goes on, draw a line between the author’s created universe and their own. This may not be a precept Ross shares, but for me the spell of “Mr. Peanut” fractures occasionally — for example, when it veers from Dr. Sheppard’s house in Ohio, rendered with mesmerizing verisimilitude, to Mobius’s jail cell in New York, where the same Sheppard, inexplicably transformed into a detective, endures a Karamazov-style inquisition from a murderer who can kill himself by holding his breath. Each piece is a tour de force, but they’re hard to reconcile in the same novel.

     Yet this one qualm is far outweighed by the trove of rewards to be found in “Mr. Peanut,” especially its audacious and moving honesty about one of society’s fundamental institutions, and its hard-won hopefulness. This is a brilliant, powerful, memorable book.

Scott Turow’s novel “Innocent,” a sequel to “Presumed Innocent,” was published last month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/books/review/Turow-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1&pagewanted=print