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Aug
30
Interview with MR. PEANUT author Adam Ross
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
I’ve made no secret of my near-obsession with Adam Ross’s debut novel Mr. Peanut—which I have now read twice (once in manuscript form and once in final copy)—and my plans to throw panties at Mr. Ross at the first opportunity. I was thrilled when he agreed to do a Q & A that would pull back the curtain and give readers a peek into the editorial process and the mind that created this incredibly complex and multi-layered novel. The fact that my friend Josh Christie (Brews and Books), who first recommended the novel to me, joined me for the interview made it all the better. Mr. Peanut is utterly unforgettable, and the writing is genius, and this, my friends, is just a little taste. You’ll find the second half of the interview at Josh’s blog this afternoon.
Mr. Peanut has a pretty labyrinthine plot, with point-of-view and the chronology of events jumping all over the place. When you were plotting the book, did you plan everything for the characters one at a time from start to finish, or did you jump around?
AR: The short answer is no, I didn’t plan or plot things out at first. Large chunks of the novel were written out of sequence, a method Nabokov used. He was very methodical in this unconsecutive approach—he wrote his novels on index cards, writing scenes and set pieces out of order and then placing them in a shoe box front to back—though I’ve adopted it more consciously now.
When I began drafting, it was more of an inspirational plunge. My father told me about the death of my second cousin, her suspicious suicide that her husband witnessed—or the murder he perpetrated—that exactly mirrors Alice’s murder/suicide in the novel, and in a single sitting I wrote three chapters that very closely resemble what’s in the book now. I didn’t know what I was doing on a macro level but almost immediately knew the novel’s last line (like a lodestar, it gave me direction during the whole journey) and I did think those initial pages had drive, so I wanted to keep building on them. Also, if you’re going to write a novel that plays with chronology or loops away from the central plot, well, those digressions better be tour de force stuff or else you’ll lose the reader, so in momentum and inspiration I trusted.
Several years into drafting, however, I began to use more organized formal principles like fugue, counterpoint, and, as with M.C. Escher’s work, tessellation both to generate plot and to make the themes play off each other. I knew I wanted to integrate certain strategies of Hitchcock’s techniques, like the use of the MacGuffin, as well as content that was braided with his work. I realize that sounds highfalutin and hyper self-conscious but it was all secondary to the main goal: I was just trying to keep the act moving. Probably the thing that I hear back from readers most, and it gladdens my heart, is that they blow through the novel. The plot’s complex, sure, but for people who’ve enjoyed it, they tell me the story rips along.
Without question, the most difficult part came toward the latter stages of drafting, and by that I mean the last two years. How to fuse the disparate elements and voices of the novel into a Mobius band? At that point, when I was more conscious of both the themes I was working with and the novel’s rhythms, I did a great deal of obsessive outlining, all of which is to say that the book’s form and content were mutually generative. And since this is a book about a video game designer, here are two great cheats both for first-time readers and re-readers: pay attention to naming throughout, but especially to the difference between David and Pepin. That’s the key to understanding how the novel is supposed to function as an inescapable video game for its characters, and its “writers.” Next, flip back to the Escher print on the title page. It’s the novel’s source code.
The novel refers to M.C. Escher and all but warns readers that they will feel lost, stuck in a loop, unsure, at times, of which way is up. Did you ever consider making the allusions to Escher (and Hitchcock) less obvious, or were they necessary to help readers understand that the confusion is intentional?
AR: Of course. I look back now and think, “Oh, well, maybe I could have toned it down there and turned up the volume there,” but I don’t think about it for long because it’s done, I’m finishing my book of stories now, asking a completely different set of questions because they’re told in an entirely different mode. All I can tell you is that I followed my lights then and don’t lose sleep over it now. “In point of fact,” writes Humbert Humbert, “there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea.” A reader like me reads that and is staggered and amazed by the hall-of-mirrors irony of those sentences, of their intertextual levels of play. And so, to readers who like those sorts of games, I say “picnic, lightning,” and they’ll know where I allude to that in Mr. Peanut. I tried to give the reader hints and clues, just as certain video game magazines supply players with cheats, cheat codes, and walk-throughs. Maybe I gave too many. I’ve read all my reviews—the great, the good, and the bad—and I can assure you of this: if I’d been less obvious, I’d have been roundly criticized by plenty of people who’d have said I should’ve have made things a little clearer.
Many reviewers have described the relationships in the novel as dysfunctional. To what extent do you think the relationships are dysfunctional, rather than just a window into the deepest, darkest thoughts of married people?
AR: I’d like every married critic who opined thusly to take a look in the mirror and say, with a straight face, “My relationship with my spouse is completely functional!”
I’m so tired of the word “dysfunctional,” honestly, because what works for Couple A might seem like madness to Couple B, a fact which points to the mysteriousness of marriage, not to mention that plenty of functioning couples have gone through patches where things were going pretty awfully. Dysfunction, it seems to me, is interlocked with its opposite over the course of any lasting relationship, just as plenty of people have injected destructive dysfunction into perfectly functioning marriages. Who the hell knows why? In lieu of dysfunctional, I’ll take Scott Turow’s description in his New York Times review: “a bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that passes for a marriage.”
What I’m writing about in Mr. Peanut is marriage’s cycling and re-cycling and how you go through periods of light and darkness, which in turn present opportunities for failure and redemption, for the infliction of harm upon each other and the chance to apply the balms of forgiveness and love. The Hastrolls, for instance, seize their chance at reaching a new understanding with each other. The Sheppards do too, but the people and forces they drew to them during their darkest hours brought destruction upon them—if, that is, we believe Sheppard’s testimony to Mobius. David and Alice failed to recover from tragedy and then lost each other afterward, in spite of the desperate lifeline Alice throws him before her disappearance. These missed opportunities are scary stuff, at least to me. Maybe that was what gave Stephen King nightmares when he read the novel.
The novel has been called “anti-marriage,” a claim with which you strongly disagree. Your characters seem to live in the tension between loving and hating each other, and one often leads directly into the other. Is this something you think exists in all marriages? If your characters weren’t fantasizing about killing their partners, how might they deal with it?
AR: I can’t answer the last question because I’m a novelist, not a guru or psychologist. Also, I’ve never heard it called “anti-marriage.” Some critics, I think, have missed how pro-marriage a book it is. I had a letter posted in Slate about this that preceded the DoubleX blog’s audio book club discussion of the novel and is worth a look because it speaks to your question and also addresses how a lack of good housekeeping in marriage can sow the seeds of destruction and misery. In this way, Mr. Peanut presents readers with a series of cautionary tales or recognitions. In that way, I hope that it’s consciousness raising.
To take your question about whether the dialectic between love and hate exists in all marriages, I’m not dodging when I say that I don’t know. What I have observed over the course of my life is that the more time we spend with our partners the more vital and exasperating to us they become and, if we’re lucky, we manage to happily soldier on in spite of the latter and because of the former.
Read the other half of this interview at Brews and Books.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rebecca Schinsky, Adam Ross, Adam Ross, Adam Ross, Adam Ross and others. Adam Ross said: RT @bookladysblog: Interview with MR. PEANUT author Adam Ross http://goo.gl/fb/FoxF8 [...]
Great interview…you can tell that you knew your subject and spent time on thoughtful and unpredictable questions. I am so bi-polar on this book. I read your review and a couple of others, and I ordered the book from the library. HAD to read it. Then I got my Bookmarks mag and the critics unanimously slammed the crap out of it. The wind went out of my sails. I’m swinging back towards your end again. It helps to have the author’s perspective.
Sandy´s last [type] ..Sunday Salon- The Big Grabowski
I’m at the half-way point of Mr. Peanut, and rather than “blow through” the book, I find myself savoring it. The airplane scene, when it encounters particularly turbulent air, is a master class in buiding and releasing tension, with a payoff as satisfying as it was unexpected. As for anti-marriage, here’s my 2 cents: a marriage is over when two people wander in their own orbits, unaware of one another and ambivalent in their feelings. The relationship in the this book are intense, focused to a fine point, and fraught with complicated emotions. If it is true that “hate” is love in disguise, this is the book to support it. I’m at the place in the book where all the balls have been thrown in the air; I can’t wait to see how Ross catches them.
Irene Ziegler´s last [type] ..Seminole Heights Library in Tampa- FL
Not a book I’ve read as yet, but thanks for a very interesting interview. From reading reviews, it certainly seems to elicit a love or hate response in many readers. Probably another one I should add to the ever growing book pile!
Des @ NovelSuggestions.com´s last [type] ..Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
[...] is a fascinating Q&A, and a great peek at what goes into a novel as complex as Mr. Peanut. This morning, Rebecca posted PART ONE of the interview on her blog. The second half is featured [...]
Great interview – this sounds like a great read!
Reeder Reads´s last [type] ..Review- Sanctuary Line – Jane Urquhart
Great interview. I too loved this book when I first read it – so happy that I picked up a copy!
Melissa´s last [type] ..Lit by Mary Karr
I’ve been avoiding this book as the subject matter is not anywhere near my usual fare, but your great interview has pushed me toward giving it a try.
So glad to hear it! This is one that’s worth the time and stretching from your comfort zone.
Hmm, I almost wish I’d read this before/during reading the book so I could notice the David/Pepin thing. I did wonder about that towards the end, but it was too late.
Jen – Devourer of Books´s last [type] ..The Gendarme by Mark Mustian – Book Review
That was one of the things in this interview that made me want to read it a third time.
[...] Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross: Because who wouldn’t want a good mindfuck for Christmas? Also, the sooner you buy it, the sooner Josh and I can stop mentioning it on every single Bookrageous podcast. [...]
[...] characters are whiny as all hell. In an interview, Adam Ross said that he didn’t consider his characters’ marriages dysfunctional, [...]