Interview with novelist Adam Ross whose Mr. Peanut novel cought my attention:
Q. When did you actually start the book?
I started the book in '95, after my father told me this story about a second cousin of mine who had massive problems with depression, lethal nut allergies and morbid obesity. According to her husband — who was conveniently the only witness to her suicide — he came home one afternoon and found her sitting at the table with a plate of peanuts. They got into an argument, and at its climax, she ingested them. Her last words to him were, "Call 911." She had hidden all her EpiPens, and she died right in front of him from anaphylactic shock after her esophagus swelled shut.
Now when I heard this story, it absolutely stopped me in my tracks. It just hit me to the core. And I sat down and wrote something that resembles the first three chapters. But then I stopped. I'd written myself into something I didn't understand. And this is where the creative process is horrifically inefficient and doesn't obey any rules of discipline, and I'm a pretty disciplined guy. That was the beginning of what turned out to be an enormously organic process.
Q. Did the novel change over time?
In the initial drafts, I had two detectives: one who thought everyone he interrogated was innocent, and the other who thought everyone he interrogated was guilty. But that was way too didactic. The novel was way too obviously allegorical and followed a kind of fanatic calculus you could see coming a mile away. It was like Lord of the Flies without the youthful violence and exuberance or the beautiful-island window dressing. Everyone was black and white.
I think one of the big turning points of the drafting was stumbling onto the Sheppard case — again, via a conversation with my father while we were watching the remake of The Fugitive with Harrison Ford and hearing that it was a real case. I'm one generation removed: I was born in '67 and the Sheppard case was in '54. What fascinated me about the Sheppard story, and why I seized upon him as kind of the ultimate gray-area figure in marriage — and the best possible detective in a way — was that in the Hollywood versions, he's the white knight of marriage: "Dammit, I'm going to clear my name and show them I was a good guy!" I wanted to dramatize him as the opposite, by examining the real story and re-imagining it.
The fascinating thing about the Sheppard story is it's such a nexus of tensions in the American marriage as we know it. You have the seeds of the sexual revolution; you have the first wave of women in the workforce enjoying a lessening of certain mores vis-à-vis being able to compete on the same playing field with men; you have women who are thus spending more time with men than their wives do, and all the concomitant sexual tensions. And then you have this Sheppard figure who basically claims in the research that he and his wife had an open relationship, because she had shut down about sex, and she essentially said to him, "You just go and do your thing." Well, to me that's a harbinger of all the moral hazards and pitfalls that ensued in our society. Look how this bears itself out in terms of American culture with respect to marriage and the institution's struggles. Here we are at a time when you've got a 50 percent divorce rate with gays wanting to marry. You've got a group of people dying to buy into the institution, whereas the people who've had it forever have been doing a great job of fucking it up royally.
Q. You imagine a much rosier alternate fate for Sheppard than what he really had: a short career as a pro wrestler, a second marriage to the half-sister of Joseph Goebbels' wife, alcoholism and early death. But he's still a shell of a man.
What strikes me most about the Sheppard story, if in fact Sheppard wasn't guilty, is that one night his life got sucked down a wormhole. His wife is brutally murdered. He loses his freedom and career. He loses access to his son. During the course of his trial, his mother kills herself, and his father dies of cancer. Then he spends 10 years in prison, dying four years later a broken man. I certainly would never presume to solve the case of whether he's guilty or innocent. But by casting Sheppard as a detective, I wanted to make use of those horrors and that experience. For if there's one message in Mr. Peanut I want every reader to come away with, it's that you should be careful what you wish for. Take care of your home base.
Q. That's why Hitchcock fits so well into the book — he understands that at a certain level, the viewer wants to vicariously experience the worst that can happen, while being let off the hook morally. The men in your book all fantasize how their lives would be different if they could experience "the worst that can happen" — and then they actually get it.
I would actually argue that Mr. Peanut is as pro-marriage a book as I could ever imagine being written, because that kind of investigation or confrontation — character to character, marriage to marriage — urges the reader to look at the here and now, and look hard.
Take, for instance, the character of Det. Ward Hastroll. He suffers with his wife while she's bedridden, but he himself is asleep to what's right in front of him. And that's the very thing I think that his wife is most terrified of, particularly given where they are in their marriage — which is, without spoilers, that stage where they have to destruct as a couple or move on to the next stage, or chapter. And so in that way, for me, Ward Hastroll and his wife are the heroes of the novel, because they're the only marriage that arrives at something like a happy ending without doing collateral damage.
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