MR. PEANUT by Adam Ross

This is a book within a book—maybe. I definitely found it difficult to distinguish between what was reality and what was imagined, but I guess it doesn't really matter, since the whole book is a product of the author's imagination. However, there is an aspect of reality, as one of the main characters is Sam Sheppard, who was convicted in the1950s and then acquitted 10 years later of his wife's murder. Sheppard, who is depicted as a man with a sex addiction problem, has abandoned medicine to become a cop. His partner, Hastroll, has marital problems of his own, as his perfectly healthy wife has not left her bed in five months. The main character, though, is David Pepin, who loves his morbidly obese wife Alice just the way she is. The pivotal event in their lives is when she has her first miscarriage in an airplane toilet on the way to Hawaii. All three wives at some point expect their husbands to intuit what is on their minds, and all three husbands entertain fantasies of murdering their wives. I felt that Hastroll and Pepin were both quite justified in their perplexed frustration, though not to the point of murder, obviously. Divorce seemed a reasonable option, but both men inexplicably love their difficult wives. As for Sheppard, he is despicable in his adulterous liaisons, pushing the limits of what is acceptable even to his male buddies. Then there's the diminutive, devilish Mobius, a private eye hired by Pepin when his wife vanishes for months, who misconstrues his role as that of a hit man. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Nathan Harold, an airline employee whose job is to cater to the Pepins' every need during their stay in Hawaii—a "fixer" of a different ilk. Both Harold and Mobius seem to be marriage problem-solvers—one who advises flexible conciliation and one who has a more drastic solution. This dark novel is just as way out as it sounds, with the author keeping all of the characters at arm's length, and that may be just where they belong—out of reach and beyond sympathy or understanding.