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.