Mr. Peanut By Adam Ross (2010)


This novel is brilliant in use of using the book itself as contraption. The pieces often comedic and tragic at the same time slowly rotate, inevitable as the shadow moves across an ancient sundial to reveal the sad ending of a fine murder mystery. The bits and pieces and gears of this windup watch, clock, a robot pattering toy you get at McDonald, are intricate and clever themselves from allusions to Hitchcock films and criticisms, various landmarks, that reveal the characters’ emotions that come bubbling up with time and resentments. Each character has a major role to play and there is a direct cycle to the end that the scenes seem to repeat themselves but still unfinished until the reader reaches to a bitter end. Each chapter, there is a sense of de ja vu.

For a while, I have this theory that novels, the best novels have certain structure to them, whether it is chapters based on doomdays of the months, use of scientific formulas to show proof of cotemporary reality, or geometric shapes like using flashbacks or only left or right path taken as circle and make them mean something to the story. They are almost like measurements of the human conditions, those literal literacy devices.

This book does follow logic to its conclusion, along with red herrings and quicken suspense, although it hurtles to its doom like a runaway train. It is more than an interactive novel, it is almost like a machine.

The characters have their lighter sides and their darker sides, or as Hitchcock explained, their doppelgangers. There is a strong connection between all, and the book reaches the darkness of the heart, described as having the texture of the tennis ball by Dr. Sheppard, the unhappy affair stricken doctor, but really is the cosmos of the soul. The reader is shattered the way one would be when the Pop Goes the Weasel music winds down, the Jack In the Box pops open and the doll’s face revealed is the face of the music box player.