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Hello and welcome to the Double X Book Club.

I'm Hannah Rosen, a co-editor of Double X, and I'm here in the Washington studio with my fellow co-editor, Emily Bazelon.

Good morning, Emily.

Hello.

And Margaret Talbot from The New Yorker who's joining us.

Hi.

Today we are going to talk about Mr. Peanut. It's the first

novel of Adam Ross, who's a Nashville writer. It's gotten a lot of attention. It's essentially a

murder mystery, but it's also a meditation on modern marriage and the trapped nature of modern

marriage. And also kind of a puzzle. He talks a lot about Escher and Mobius

strips and it takes a lot of picking apart in the novel. So we're going to talk about the various

themes in it. Let me ask you ladies, this involves basically three parallel stories. One is the

murder, the initial murder that opens the book, which is about David and Alice Pepin. Wait, not necessarily a murder. The initial death. The initial death. Excuse me. You're right. It's ambiguous. This is a couple. One of the lines on this book is that it's about men fantasizing about killing their wives. That's something that recurs in the novel a lot. And David Pepin is, or Pepin, Pepin, Pepin, Pepin,

is David Pepin and his wife, Alice Pepin, who's very overweight and endlessly trying to lose weight.

That's one of the couples. Another is Detective Sam Shepard, who is the famous Sam Shepard of the mid-century murder case. And the last couple is Detective Hastrol and his wife, Hannah, who refuses to get out of bed. So let me ask you, I'll ask you, Margaret, first. Which of these did you find most compelling or which drew you in? Because I was surprised at when I asked friends who read the novel, they had a completely different reaction to this than I did. Well, it is, as you say, sort of books within books.

It's a fairly complex structure. And in fact, the book has lots of references to Mobius

strips as a metaphor for marriage, a lot of references to video games. This character, David

Pippen is a video game designer. A lot of references to Escher. This character, David Pippen, is a video game designer.

A lot of references to Escher. So there is this puzzle-like aspect to it. But there is one sort of

section of the book, which is almost a very separate set piece, which could almost be a novella

on its own and which I thought was the most successful and to me the most involving section

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