Finishing Mr. Peanut

Finally finished Adam's novel this afternoon after a torturous half-week of reading it. It's so dark and disturbing and downright brilliant in places that I had to set it down, had to pick it back up.

I'm linking to Scott Turow's review because I don't want to ruminate on or even attempt to condense the plot details here. The reader experiences three portraits of marriage, each suffering from a desperation and a failure to connect, a maddening blindness (toward self and spouse), and a resulting violence that bubbles up to the surface. I'm not sure that sentence is quite parallel. Oh well.

Hoping Adam won't mind if I quote him directly here from our earlier conversation:

"In large part, this book is a critique of our ever more virtual/distracted society and how these distractions--be they sexual, avataristic, or otherwise--lead us away from the most immediate, important things before us (our spouses and children, unborn or in their earliest adolescence). David is writing a novel that is an attempt to re-grasp what he wasn't present to (Alice), while also exploring aspects of his guilt via avatars (Hastroll/Sheppard). But avatars fall short. They are a prophylactic on life.

And yet at the same time his art is very much alive and possibly a cautionary tale that is a wake-up call to the reader."

My question upon finishing the novel is whether or not art is ultimately portrayed as redemptive or destructive. In short, Mr. Peanut requires reading and rereading. The layers of fantasy, fiction, and reality blur throughout. Makes me think about the stories we tell ourselves and the narratives we construct in the absence of - really the impossibility of - fully knowing ourselves or another person. In one of my favorite passages, the main character, David Pepin (David/Pepin - two versions of the same character), writes in his own novel:

"There are two of us, of course, David and Pepin, interlocked and separate and one and the same. I'm writing my better self and he's writing his worse and vice versa and so until the end. A good reader - a good detective - knows this by now. If you don't, look in the mirror. That's you and not you, after all, because the person in your mind isn't the person in the world. And if you don't know this already, you will."

I don't think Adam would mind me saying that it is also quite the sexy novel, too. Good old-fashioned graphic. And as a few of us discovered after his book-reading, it's amazing what you can see on the cover after getting into two bottles of wine and flipping it upside down. It has its own Escher-like qualities, as does the novel itself.