The question is: Is Mr. Peanut too clever? That's for the reader to decide. Many readers will smile and be beckoned by the Borges-like structure, the matryoshka-doll / Escher-print architecture. Ross makes sure you see it, offering a series of metaphors for the ambiguous puzzle of the novel: the art of M.C. Escher; the films of Alfred Hitchcock; the winding, flowcharted pathways of video games. Reality is tessellated into dream, dream inside-outed into reality. And some readers will moan, "Oh, come on," and throw it aside.
They shouldn't. Above everything else - the spectacular language, the existential jokery, the knowing, look-Mom pyrotechnics - this is quite a novel.
It is also a clear-eyed, relentless, heartless depiction of the woe that is in marriage.
Marriage is the theme, or at least the repeated tale, of Mr. Peanut. We observe various marriages, and in each one, man and woman cannot understand. One tale is based on the marriage, affair, and 1954 murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. I've seldom read such trenchant evocations of how it feels when you've lost your spouse and try everything to get him or her back, that sickening, humiliating sense of being lost in the woods, of desperate love desperate to hide itself, covering up while trying to resurrect love in the remote and receding spouse. At one point, we are told that one spouse (I will paraphrase) dares the other to care, and is poised to punish them when they try. Perfect.
Indeed, grueling. We watch people try to rapproche, to get a marriage back to a remembered (maybe an imaginary), idealized past, when love was confident and everything worked. There's never such a past, of course, and we know it, even as we flail and search everywhere. And Ross is superb in following these lost bread trails in crazily savage woods.
