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Mr. Peanut

by Adam Ross (Goodreads Author)

3.28 of 5 stars 3.28 · rating details · 2,971 ratings · 766 reviews

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 suspi...more

Hardcover, 335 pages

Published June 22nd 2010 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2010)

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Lists with This Book

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010

27th out of 100 books — 559 voters

Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Unhappy Marriages

83rd out of 228 books — 124 voters

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Community Reviews

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Nov 17, 2010 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: crime-mystery, modern-lit

Why do divorces cost so much?

Because they’re worth it.*

*(That joke brought to you by my ex-wife. Not to be confused with the far superior current Mrs. Kemper. Hi, honey!)

Anyone who has had a long-term relationship that involved living with your significant other has had this moment. Not when you get on each other’s nerves over the trivial crap like hogging all the blankets or not picking up your socks. I’m talking about that moment when you look at someone you know and love better than anyone el...more
Why do divorces cost so much?

Because they’re worth it.*

*(That joke brought to you by my ex-wife. Not to be confused with the far superior current Mrs. Kemper. Hi, honey!)

Anyone who has had a long-term relationship that involved living with your significant other has had this moment. Not when you get on each other’s nerves over the trivial crap like hogging all the blankets or not picking up your socks. I’m talking about that moment when you look at someone you know and love better than anyone else, and thinking:

“I have no idea who you are, what you’re thinking at this moment, why you’re doing that, and I’d pay any amount of money to be on the other side of the planet assembling iPods in a Chinese sweatshop for the rest of my life rather then spend another minute trying to figure it out.”

But those moments pass. Usually. If not, then see the first two sentences of this review. It’s is an oddity of marriage/cohabitation where you sometimes realize just how little any of us know each other. Adam Ross illustrates this concept brilliantly in Mr. Peanut.

David Pepin loves his wife, Alice, but they’re having a lot of problems. Alice has become extremely obese. David doesn’t have a problem with her weight, it’s Alice’s repeated insistence on following the latest dieting or exercise fads that make his life miserable. When she’s in these phases, David is dealing with constant needy mood swings while she’s trying to lose weight and then her crushing guilt when she fails.

To cope with this, David constantly fantasizes about Alice’s death. Not necessarily murdering her, just what it would be like if she was dead. The book skips forward in time to a point where Alice is actually dead after losing a lot of weight. She died from an allergic reaction to eating peanuts. David claims she did it deliberately to kill herself, but did he really force the peanuts down her throat?

Two detectives think David killed her. But Ward Hastroll’s wife refuses to leave her bed, and his partner, Sam Sheppard (Hmm, I wonder why that name seems familiar?), had some issues with his late wife. So the cops who are trying to figure out what happened between David and Alice are baffled by their own marriages.

It’s at this point that Mr. Peanut gets extremely ambitious and more than a little weird. But in a good way. The story folds back over itself and hops around in time. There are significant detours into the cops’ stories, and there’s another layer of weirdness there. But despite it’s clever use of structure and keeping the reader in the dark until the end of the book, Ross never loses the main point. Namely, that no one knows what’s really go on in a marriage, including the people in it.(less)

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Oct 27, 2011 Paquita Maria Sanchez rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Paquita Maria by: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/161405498

Shelves: literature

Painful. Grim as the Reaper. The mind (and so this book) goes to some dark places with love and attachment, often leaving lovers to expect the worst from one another simply because they can see the horror in their own hearts. Ross explores the darkness-cloaked, menacing landscapes of the mind occupied by an intimate other, the comparisons made between worldviews, needs, habits, desires in life and in the boudoir, and the way that long-term affection so often leaves you reaching your hands toward...more Painful. Grim as the Reaper. The mind (and so this book) goes to some dark places with love and attachment, often leaving lovers to expect the worst from one another simply because they can see the horror in their own hearts. Ross explores the darkness-cloaked, menacing landscapes of the mind occupied by an intimate other, the comparisons made between worldviews, needs, habits, desires in life and in the boudoir, and the way that long-term affection so often leaves you reaching your hands toward your lover's neck in your sleep (so to speak...I have yet to sleepwalk strangle a bedmate, just to be clear). Cruelty and missteps abound in this hyper-aware horrorshow of a first novel which manages to shake out the the grains of truth in seemingly disparate dreamscapes, landscapes, cinescapes, eras, and relationship types in search of a unifying theory on the terror of love. To Ross, it seems, we are all frightened, are all in the midst of a desperate groping, a short-sighted, pleasure-seeking species in need of a spanking and scolding. "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You" does not apply when the panties drop or the finger gets itself a ring. Sounds pretty cynical, yeah? Well, there's a point in there somewhere that you spend most of the book seeking, seething for as Ross pummels you with the inner dialogue of a bunch of characters who seem on the surface to be just awful, insufferable, EVIL human beings. The most skillful trick that Ross pulls on his readers is forcing them to face the fact that it's not so simple, that the story is becoming more and more familiar until the reality of it boils over within you, that you have thought and done these things to others, and they to and about you. But why, then, do we continue? Who would be fools enough to open the gates to their blackened, bruised hearts? Why trust at all? And while we are on the subject, why should anyone trust you? I can't tell you that, since it's sorta the point of the book and I refuse to be that asshole. Caution, now! I had to take a two week break from it at the halfway point because it was eating up my insides a bit. Read it if only to face yourself and others...just don't expect the process to be pretty. (less)

21 likes · like · see review

Jul 29, 2010 karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: littry-fiction

oh, mr. peanut - you were so close to earning a five-star rating from me!! and this is probably my failing rather than any fault of the book, in a way, because i had unrealistic expectations based on just sheer enthusiastic nothing. the book starts out so strong, that when it started going mildly wrong for me, i felt betrayed, and maybe took its departure from where i wanted it to be a little personally*. (i call this house of leaves syndrome) i had been shelving this book for at least a month,...more

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Aug 23, 2012 Ben Loory rated it 5 of 5 stars

really probably more like a 4.5, but i'm rounding up because this guy's voice is just incredible. it's the kind of voice that makes you suddenly realize how similar most other writers' voices actually are. it's just effortlessly flowing, hypnotically propulsive, funny, sad, vivid, smart-- it's really just a marvel. every sentence is beautiful but devoid of that preciousness that so many writers seem to have which demands not just that you simply experience the beauty but also STOP AND STEP BACK...more

10 likes · like · see review

Mar 25, 2012 Gary rated it 2 of 5 stars

Like Fight Club, but take out Tyler Durden and replace him with a complete pansy. Now you have two pansys just whimpering at each other.

Seriously, though, the book was good at times and bad at times. It's about the darker side of marriage. The focus is on this couple and it's mildly interesting. Then the wife dies by ingesting a mouthful of peanuts (to which she's deathly allergic). The police think murder, the husband thinks suicide.

Then the book just railroads into these crazy tangents about...more

9 likes · like · see review

Dec 27, 2011 Christine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

I hope my boyfriend never reads this (although we both know it's true and we both know he know's I know it): men are a joke. It sounds mean if you read it as a judgement, which is not how I mean it - after all, some of my best friends are men! I have the aforementioned boyfriend! But it is simply a statement of fact: in any and all ways requiring complex human compassion and communication, men are comically maladroit. Which is the kind of thought you will stew over and ruminate on while you read...more I hope my boyfriend never reads this (although we both know it's true and we both know he know's I know it): men are a joke. It sounds mean if you read it as a judgement, which is not how I mean it - after all, some of my best friends are men! I have the aforementioned boyfriend! But it is simply a statement of fact: in any and all ways requiring complex human compassion and communication, men are comically maladroit. Which is the kind of thought you will stew over and ruminate on while you read this book, in which all the male characters - or all they all the same male character, broken into Escher-like fragments? - stew over, ruminate on, obsess and dream about, plan, fixate, fume and fantasize about killing their wives. Always it comes back to just killing the bitch. And all the characters are male, or delineated so narrowly through their husband's gaze it's impossible to see them objectively, only as these inscrutable bringers-of-pain, which I suppose is the point. Some of them even do it, by which I mean off the bitch, by which I mean we're up to a body count of 2, and I'm only halfway through.

I have a little game I play when I read a book, in which I ask myself, "Self, what if all the genders - including the gender of the author - were reversed? What would we have then, eh?" I'll tell you one thing: I may have to be the one to write it, but a novel in which every single woman fixates on wanting to kill her husband would be a book I would buy in hardback and read immediately, as no such book has ever been written that I know of. When and if it ever is written, I have my doubts that it will be reviewed as glowingly as Mr. Peanut. (Though to be fair Mr. Peanut is pretty well written for dude lit.)

I don't know, because I've never been with a person of the opposite sex - or of the same sex, for that matter - for 15 or 20 years, as these characters have. Probably you do start wanting them to die. That's certainly true of my ex-husband, but it was nothing a divorce couldn't take care of. Murder seemed a bit extreme. Murder as a novelistic device is of course a different story, but it is extremely creepy how much violence is directed toward women in this book, even if it is done consciously and with so much psychological acumen. And with so much readerly realization that men are a joke. (less)

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Apr 12, 2011 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Probably more of a 2-1/2 star review. I had to push myself to get through this one. By the end, I was mostly glad I saw it through. The last 50 or so pages redeemed some of the problems I had with the book. And ultimately, this is a significantly better book than I could ever hope to write, in terms of the writing, the plotting, the twists, the tying everything together.

Ultimately, though, I just found the themes of (1) women being murdered brutally by their husbands and (2) women being so emoti...more

8 likes · like · see review

May 30, 2011 Ben Bush added it

At the center of the book is a pretty great 120-page historical novella about Dr. Sam Sheppard, the heart surgeon who did or didn't murder his wife and it plays around in some interesting ways with the impossibility of knowing what actually happened. In my imagination, Adam Ross wrote this and then was pretty hard pressed to figure out how to shape it into something of novel length and has put on either side of it has put a conceptually interesting but kind of poorly written experimental novel....more At the center of the book is a pretty great 120-page historical novella about Dr. Sam Sheppard, the heart surgeon who did or didn't murder his wife and it plays around in some interesting ways with the impossibility of knowing what actually happened. In my imagination, Adam Ross wrote this and then was pretty hard pressed to figure out how to shape it into something of novel length and has put on either side of it has put a conceptually interesting but kind of poorly written experimental novel. The very end is clever but by that point he's lost the plot so completely over the preceding 50 pages that's it's not exactly a home run. One of the oddest things about things about the book is how the material about Sam Sheppard, set in the 1950s feels so completely and believably imagined, but that the contemporary stuff about Ross's own time period feels cardboard thin. This was a section that particularly made me cringe. "They kissed, and it was like a (sic) watching a sand castle washed over by a wave: merlons of the parapets melted to crenels, turrets toppled and gun slits collapsed sliding into the sea." but as I write this I'm reminded that one of the novel's conceits is that some of it is being written by the good version of the main character and the other part is being written by the bad one and so perhaps I've missed the greater point that one of them is intended to be a very melodramatic writer. There's stuff that makes this book pretty interesting but in the end I can't exactly recommend it. It would be interesting to hear the reactions of someone who read only pages 156-269. I've never watched "Mad Men" and I wonder if I had, whether I'd be less impressed by the hard-drinking, adulterous 1950s world Ross has conjured up. There's a reference to "to the mad men of Madison Avenue" in the later section of the book that feels semi-anachronistic, although I assume the term predates the TV show.

The part about Hawaii could have been way shorter, but I like his use of various close third perspectives. Also, I feel like I learned something kind of technical from it about quotes in flashbacks within a large scene. (Spoiler: don't use paragraph breaks after each of these like you normally would.)

(less)

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Feb 05, 2011 Rosy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

A quote from the real Dr. Sam Sheppard opens the book in the epigraph, "I became or thought that I was disoriented and the victim of a bizarre dream." An appropriate beginning, prophetic for the journey the reader is about to undergo with this novel - a story within a story about marriage, murder, the search for a connection, the disconnect between who you think you are and how others perceive you. Certainly it is how I felt when I finished this dizzying book, and I loved every second of it.

Davi...more

8 likes · like · see review

Aug 07, 2011 Neil Schleifer rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: thriller, mystery, contemporary-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. A cynical and ultimately manipulative psychological case study of the relationship between men and women, masquerading as a mystery thriller, I found MR. PEANUT ultimately unsatisfying.

Ross, in keeping with David Pepin's job as a creator of computer games, plays with the idea of alternate realities; multiple endings; unlikely intersections of fate and time. In games and puzzles this is terrific. But in a book that is supposedly a mystery story this comes off as the author's refusal to commit to...more

13 likes · like · see review

May 10, 2013 K.K. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-book-log

It felt funny to read the first page of this book just after having read Gone Girl. Both starting on the uncertainty of whether or not a husband killed his wife. I grew a little suspicious that the fates might be trying to tell me something...

But this book far excels over Gone Girl in its complexity, richness of language, and depth of feeling. The novel is engrossing and moving in a way that required breaks from the vivid description of crime scenes and tragic gruesomeness.

The only reason that...more

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Mar 27, 2013 James Thane rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

In Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross journeys into the dark underbelly of love and marriage by charting the course of three different relationships that impinge on each other. Principal among them is the marriage of David and Alice Pepin. The two met in a films class and have been married for thirteen years. David is still completely in love with Alice, but at the same time he fantasizes about her death, often in very ghoulish ways. Alice is severely overweight and allergic to a variety of things. Then one...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Carla rated it 3 of 5 stars

I don't know if it was my edition or what but the whole thing seemed really disjointed and jumbled. While, as a person who has researched some of the more famous crimes as a "hobby", I liked some of the integration of Sheppard, I was really bothered by some of the things the author took the liberty to assign to Marilyn. Really, the whole thing probably would have been more enjoyable had he chosen one couple and focused solely on their life and tragedy or success, whatever the case may be.
Also, I...more

1 like · like · see review

Feb 17, 2013 Sophia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Sophia by: NYT book review

Shelves: 2013, mystery, new-york

Adam Ross’s debut novel Mr. Peanut is a moving exploration of the highs and lows of marriage. Alice Pepin is found dead from peanut-induced anaphylaxis in her New York apartment after she begins a mysterious, finally-successful weight loss campaign. Her husband David, a successful computer game designer trying to bring his novel to completion, is a prime suspect being investigated by two detectives with particular issues in their own marriages. Ward Hastroll’s wife has suddenly and stubbornly st...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Katie rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book was all over the place for me. There were real page-turning points where I would've given it 4 stars, and other points where it was a 1 or 2-star book for me.

The story centers around a murder mystery--a dead wife, and naturally the husband is a suspect. Did he kill her or didn't he? There are also 2 detectives who have serious marital problems of their own, and you hear alllll about their stories as well (to a fault--at times their stories dragged for me, although at times they were q...more

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Dec 19, 2012 Mark Schuliger rated it 2 of 5 stars

After reading some reviews of this book and seeing it on a year's best list, I was really excited to read it. I expected it to have a bit of a "mind trip" to it and I'd say it does. That is perhaps the most disappointing part of this book for me. This trick did not appeal to me at all. Perhaps I just didn't "get it". I mean, I get what he was doing, I just don't see the "coolness" of it. For me it came as a big flop.

On the positive side of things, the writing was good. I didn't really buy some o...more

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Oct 26, 2012 Louise rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I found this on a few "best book" lists, so I expected more than a standard "who done it". I was taken in by the murder mystery presented in the initial pages. It had a very clever premise and a good narrative on the beginning part of the investigation. Unfortunately, the intriguing mystery devolved into an exploration of three dysfunctional marriages: that of the (potential) murder victim and her chief suspect husband, and those of the two detectives working on the case.

I stayed with it all the...more I found this on a few "best book" lists, so I expected more than a standard "who done it". I was taken in by the murder mystery presented in the initial pages. It had a very clever premise and a good narrative on the beginning part of the investigation. Unfortunately, the intriguing mystery devolved into an exploration of three dysfunctional marriages: that of the (potential) murder victim and her chief suspect husband, and those of the two detectives working on the case.

I stayed with it all the way to the end which sort of ties up the Pepin murder, but leaves open the question as to why the details of the Hastroll and Sheppard marriages are in this book. The appearance of Sheppard, a real life medical doctor who served time for murdering his wife and was later absolved, as a detective is particularly jarring. This book takes place in the cell phone era, so Sheppard would be a 77 year old (doctor turned) detective in 2000; 87 in 2011.

The ruminations on marriage not only add clutter to the story, they are from a disturbing point of view of the three husbands. They seem to focus on obsession rather than love or companionship. The wives that author Adam Ross has created are aloof and the husbands he's created can't figure them out. I would think Alice Pepin may be disturbed because, added to her miscarriages, she knows that her husband is writing a novel about killing her. It does not occur to her husband (or the author?) that this could be upsetting her. Mr. Pepin's actions show he is trying to hold the marriage together, but his attitude tells a different story. Sam Sheppard has been philandering since day one. He doesn't consider the impact of inviting his mistress to a party/tryst at the home of one of his wife's best friends, he just does it. Here, the author expresses sympathy for the mistress and some for the wife. Detective Hastroll has no idea how his wife's agoraphobia developed, and it seems that the author doesn't either. His is a story of coping and resentment.

This author can write, but seems to have included material from two other books he has brewing in his head. If he had stuck with the Pepin murder and the kept the marriage scrutiny to that of the victim, and kept detectives doing detective work (a few side bars OK - maybe 50 pages total) this could have been a much better book.

Where is Maxwell Perkins when we need him?(less)

1 like · like · see review

Aug 30, 2012 Peter Rosch rated it 5 of 5 stars

Adam Ross. I share your pain. You have written a wonderfully dark book, a piece of fiction born from the very real complexities of matrimony–the type of book that makes one uncomfortable as their minds begin to wander from the story at hand to their own stories at home. I suspect that combination is what has led so many folks to rate it poorly. Your book cover has a skull on it, and maybe a whole slew of readers just assumed it would be about skeletons, literally. Who knows?

What I do know, is i...more

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Jul 20, 2012 Gabriel added it

Shelves: 2012, vvv

The books I most admire read like confluences of chance, like more than one book. This is not to say that they aren't unified (although I do like fractures), but that they are polyvalent, opening out into the world. Smooth, unbroken surfaces hide what is inside. We crack open a book and out spill the words. In those words, a further spill.

I seldom read fewer than three books at once; maybe it's a bad habit, but it's mine. There were moments in reading Mr. Peanut where I had to think for a moment...more The books I most admire read like confluences of chance, like more than one book. This is not to say that they aren't unified (although I do like fractures), but that they are polyvalent, opening out into the world. Smooth, unbroken surfaces hide what is inside. We crack open a book and out spill the words. In those words, a further spill.

I seldom read fewer than three books at once; maybe it's a bad habit, but it's mine. There were moments in reading Mr. Peanut where I had to think for a moment which book I was reading—what I mean by "more than one book" (in this case, anyway). I guess that's natural, given that those other books, the ones I read in parallel with this one, were about Vertigo, about Hitchock. But the narratives—the stories of each—weren't distinct in my mind, a feeling that can properly be called uncanny. It's less to do with the appropriation and allusion going on in Ross's book (though that's part of it, as I've already indicated) than with the way he's structured his story. If this is intended as an ode on a Möbius strip, the Sam Sheppard section is where we cross from one "side" to the other (though there's only one side, of course), and that section starts and restarts, making us crazy for a finish that we've already reached, having begun it. Dr. Otto, on the MacGuffin:

Stated simply, this is what gets the story rolling but then fades in importance after it's introduced. Take The 39 Steps. The hero, Hannay, meets a woman at a local London music hall who claims to be a spy hunted by assassins. They're after her, she says, because she's discovered a plot to steal British military secrets and something called, of course, the 39 Steps. She's murdered that night in Hannay's apartment, so he's got to prove his innocence while racing all over Scotland and London trying to figure out the secret, which naturally has nothing to do with what the movie's about. What it's about is the hero and the heroine's struggles to trust each other. Which is the beauty of the MacGuffin, because once you learn what it is you can immediately get busy ignoring it.

But what if the MacGuffin is the hero and heroine's struggle to trust each other?(less)

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Jun 09, 2012 Josh rated it 1 of 5 stars

Well written and inventive, but utterly depressing. Perhaps I shouldn't have read this book -- ultimately about marital disfunction and dissatisfaction, to the point of fantasized death -- right before going to a wedding, and while helping to plan my own. Many proponents of the book will probably point out how the relationships between the married couples is somehow representative of human nature, how mankind is spiraling a drain of self-delusion by believing that we can be happily locked into a...more

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Jun 07, 2012 Darrenglass rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not exactly an uplifting read.

Ross's novel is about three marriages, all of which are happy at times but unhappy at far more times. And as we learn about the three we learn that all three husbands have fantasized about killing their wives -- and early in the book we learn that one of the wives has turned up dead from eating peanuts despite a severe allergy. Is her husband responsible for the death, either directly or indirectly? That is what the other two men are investigating, and it is through...more

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Mar 27, 2012 Matt rated it 2 of 5 stars

I feel like I'm swimming upstream here, given the generally positive reviews of this book and the way it landed on a lot of top ten lists, etc, but I thought this was kind of overdone. I mean, I appreciate the ambition of it, this kind of weirdly self-aware book that recycles lots of language (for example, the way that the Mr Peanut of the title reappears and morphs to mean different things in different sections of the book) and that generally seems to be aware of itself as literature. The level...more

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Jan 09, 2012 Rebecca Brothers rated it 1 of 5 stars

Adam Ross' book, Mr. Peanut, should have been titled Mr. Penis. I read this book because it was hyped up all around town here in Nashvegas--Ross is a local author and newly formed celebrity. Mr. Peanut was released to incredible acclaim--the New York Times said Ross is a "sorcerer with words."From Publisher's Weekly we hear: "Ross's depiction of love is grotesque and tender at once, and his style is commanding as he combines torture and romance to create a sense of vertigo-as-romance. It's a uni...more

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Aug 29, 2011 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

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...more

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Jul 24, 2011 NJMetal rated it 3 of 5 stars

Mr. Peanut is a gripping story of the trials and tribulations of the every-marriage. The story follows three married couples through a series of flashbacks. The wife if each couple is found dead, the husbands are the immediate suspects in each case. But did they really do it?

The Pepins are the lead couple in this story. Mrs. Pepin is found dead by her husband and taken in for questioning. The two detectives assigned to interrogate Mr. Pepin each have a sorrdid past with their own wives. Who kill...more

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Jul 04, 2011 Phloe rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book made me stick to my diet.

Admittedly, I was quite third-assed about the whole regimen. It didn't really do a whole lot to cut rice out from one's diet if they were going to replace it with a bottle of pinot. Yet one WANTS to justify it - "it's a liquid" or "look at how trim Burroughs was". Sigh.

Mr. Peanut, freshman effort from Mr. Ross, is way better than a lot of first-novelly-thingees proffered forth by others. This is arguably true. One feels the conviction -- the rightheous key-slap...more

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May 25, 2011 Joy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Yes, the puzzle-piece, shifting narrative structure was interesting, but I am just sick to death of reading/hearing/seeing stories of men who hate women (oh, but they love and marry them too, as if that weren't possible. Come on.). The two main (male) characters, in particular, are cheating pieces of sh*t (I don't know the goodreads policy on cursing, but believe me, it's deserved) who act even worse when their wives have pregnancy-related crises. So, first, we're blaming the women for their rep...more

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May 06, 2011 Shinelle rated it 3 of 5 stars

The novel drew me in almost immediately. I sympathized with David Pepin--anybody who's ever been in a long-term relationship probably sympathizes with him--and became emotionally invested in the plot resolution, until the plot began to splinter and re-splinter. The conceit of the novel-within-a-novel was at first fascinating, when I couldn't tell which part is meta-novel and which part is plain old novel, and then became wearisome, as I continued to have difficulty discerning which part is meta-...more

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Apr 12, 2011 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

The book that was described to me as a good, quick read turned out to be just that. It took me three days to read M.r Peanut, and the story was rarely dull. It does get a little clogged in overexplaining certain meanings in the storylines (the bits about Hitchcock I had to skim after a while) and the stories within stories get a little silly noirish compared to the main narrative sandwiching the book as a whole. But this story, the stories inside it, give you a lot to think about when it comes t...more

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Mar 25, 2011 Celina Araujo rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 struc...more

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About Adam Ross

Adam Ross lives in Nashville with his wife and two daughters. His debut novel, Mr. Peanut, a 2010 New York Times Notable Book, was also named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The
Philadelphia Inquirer, The New Republic, and The Economist. Ladies and Gentlemen, his short story collection, was included in Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2011. His nonfiction has been published in T...more

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The BBC International Short Story Award 2012

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Trivia About Mr. Peanut

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Quotes from Mr. Peanut

“You know, as I've grown older, my ideas about sin have changed. I used to believe that sins were things you did, but I don't think that now. I think sins are what you ignore.” — 16 people liked it

“A man who loves his mother too much is someone who can never love his wife enough.” — 5 people liked it

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title link	preview: Mr. Peanut
avg rating	preview: Mr. Peanut Goodreads rating: 3.28 (2971 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6893663-mr-peanut?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320533086l/6893663.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6893663-mr-peanut?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross[/url]

Mr. Peanut

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