You might know of Adam Ross from his time as a middle school English teacher at Harpeth Hall, or you might recognize his name from the Nashville Scene. If you happen to scour the Times Book Review or bookstore windows, you would know that he recently published his first two books, which were both criticstartling. His debut novel and incumbent chef-d'oeuvre Mr. Peanut (2010), is a vivisection of three broken marriages, whose narratives reflect in each partner, the unattainable desire for a clean-cut exit—whether it be through art, sex, or murder. In the subsequent collection of stories he published that same year, Ladies and Gentlemen, the narrators grapple with a vision of utopia they fear will lead them to destruction. Morality looms large in Adam’s fictional worlds, and he illustrates it as an endless Escher-esque staircase of rule-breaking and lesson-learning. I had two chances to sit in the author’s book-lined home study, and scribble silently as he soliloquized about his own utopian visions. Whether he was decked out in white-collar work garb and sipping black coffee, or in exercise duds with a beer in hand, remote in the other, tiVoing “SEAL Team Six” on CNN, it wasn’t much of a gearshift for him to go between home life and book talk. This is an American author. Adam, both proud and baffled by Mr. Peanut’s wild success, didn’t anticipate such a strong response to his debut. Duly so, the book achieves somewhat of an autobiographical representation, but in a completely eccentric work of fiction. That is, its three narratives, which press the readers’ noses against the windowpanes of strangers’ marriages, illustrate Adam’s views on marriage and morality. But Adam’s literary worlds aren’t reflections of his marital realities. Rather, the author claims, they depict his worst unfounded fears for his own marriage. “I’ve been to places in my marriage that make me sympathetic to [husbands in Mr. Peanut],” he admits,
gravely, with a qualifying burp from his Yuengling, “but my take on those stories is hyperbolic.” Adam has two daughters, one of whom bashfully interrupts our conversation to give him a kiss on the cheek, which he invites with a raspy, “C’mere.” I meet his beautiful wife in their herb garden, where she trims basil with a smile. As he muses on this “good life”, which I have just witnessed firsthand, the author says, “That’s the most Escher-like idea! Our happiness traces the outline of a possible form of unhappiness. We’re sometimes so close to the opposite of
"WE’RE SOMETIMES SO CLOSE TO THE OPPOSITE OF WHERE WE ARE. THAT, I THINK, IS REALLY AMERICAN." where we are. That, I think, is really American.” This idea of Americanness, though, is mostly something I have to force on our discussion. Not being one for poetry of place, Adam explains that his interest in place “is mostly limited to the way it affects the mind.” Place only incidentally controls his plots, differentiating him from other contemporary writers such as Jonathan Franzen or Johnathan Safran-Foer. He employs a Hitchcockian trick—situating his stories in a somewhat arbitrary time and place without weaving either too crucially into his narrative. But he is no less socially engaging for doing so. Adam has a great ability to invent realistic worst-case scenarios and their guides to both success and failure. However, it’s tempting to think that he might have been inspired by
his upbringing in New York or his life in Nashville, where he’s party to the alleged high societies of Green Hills and Belle Meade. But he still claims his spark wasn’t ignited by one particular location. Adam believes subconscious inspiration presents itself in inexplicable ways, and he refuses to claim his own genius. He laughs, recalling Paris, where in September he spoke on a panel with contemporary heavy hitters like Karen Russell and Louise Erdrich, where Adam was even celebrated as an auteur demigod. Apparently, in France, they still give writers as much credit for knowledge of the human psyche, as we in America give to televised political pundits. “People give the artist too much credit for control over his muse,” he chuckles. “I don’t know what I know until I write it. I’m just looking for some sort of internal consistency with what I put on the page.” And the grisly stories he constructs from elements of his own life remain consistent in their journeys and purposes: they travel into symbolic, surreal territories, designed to cast the readers into self-reflection. Adam’s symbolic tangents are hypnotizing, to the effect that you fully insert yourself into these complicated hypothetical situations he creates, becoming perplexed with how you would behave. "I hope,” he says, “that I'm learning from these object lessons and cautionary tales I write." He's living paragraph to paragraph again, holding himself against the standard of his own alleged genius. The novel to which he's currently holding his pistol of a pen is called Playworld, and talk of it twists his face into a diabolical smirk. "Maybe this book will never be finished," he jokes, flaunting this passive relationship to his own creation, giving full credit to his elusive, muselike subconscious, "maybe I hang myself first." He continues, to my delight, to talk about Playworld. Set in New York City, it examines the life of a ////// 51