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A Novel
by Adam Ross
Book Reviewed by:Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.
"In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn't seem strange at the time."
Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin's senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi's Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.
Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age's excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.
Excerpt
Playworld, by Adam Ross
Oren was always worth seeking out at these parties, because he was a fearless explorer of other people's rooms. Closed doors meant nothing to him. Closets were never off-limits. Bureaus begged to be opened, whether they belonged to strangers or to our parents, whose wall-length dresser he regularly raided with abandon. He'd found treasures there: rolls of quarters stacked like Lincoln Logs, reserved for the basement laundry machines but that we skimmed to play Missile Command at Stanley's Stationery Store; my father's dog tags, their gunmetal stamped with risen letters like Braille and revealing his given name, Hertzberg. (When Dad became an actor, he'd changed it to Hurt.) Buried beneath Mom's underwear, Oren had also uncovered her diaphragm, waiting until I was present to pop its plastic container. He stretched its dome with his fingers to a near-porous transparency.
"I think it's a yarmulke," he theorized.
"For what," I said, "the rain?" I sealed ...
Griffin's relationship with Amanda is the good stuff of fourteen-year-old boy fiction, familiar but heartfelt, and richly drawn. For all the great aspects of Playworld, though, the book fails to cohere into a great novel. The voice that holds these scenes together is often grating to me. Ross writes in this smooth, falsely literary style, at times inexplicably grandiose; his sentences have the cadence and sheen of "good" writing—important writing—but I kept getting snagged on sentences and phrases that seemed obviously grammatically incorrect, or at the very least that featured confusing misplaced modifiers. Beyond sloppiness, there is an annoying faux profundity in this style and in Griffin's thoughts. For all of Playworld's detail and hyperspecificity, for all its indictment of those people who abandon their responsibilities to others, it doesn't quite say as much as it thinks it does...continued
Full Review
(1548 words)
(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).
Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Playworld is a novel that is a time machine of a kind, if they were ever used to seek revelations. I was reintroduced to an American history I lived through, and so much of what I had never known I'd forgotten, so much of what I was never taught to fear—but perhaps should have been. This was not my story but I saw mine in it—a boy lost in the house of adulthood, trying to learn how to be one of the people he sees around him. Haunting, mesmerizing, provoking—this novel is a triumph. Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
Playworld is an astonishing, immersive novel that deserves a place in the pantheon of Great New York Novels. I loved this book for its textures, its music, and its moral accounting of ordinary life and ordinary time. And the characters! What characters! This is a late-breaking classic and might very well be Ross's masterpiece. Harlan Coben, author of Think Twice
A wonderful, full-bodied, modern-yet-old-school novel that brings the New York City of the 1980s to vibrant life. Ross will make you laugh and break your heart. I haven't felt this immersed in a work of fiction in a long time.
Adam Ross's novel Playworld takes place between 1980 and 1981, during which time the characters follow with interest the election, presidency, and attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
The attempted assassination of Reagan took place in March 1981, just a few months after he was inaugurated for his first term. The would-be assassin was 25-year-old John Hinckley, Jr., who opened fire as the president was leaving a hotel in Washington, DC. Three of his bullets hit other men who were with Reagan, and one ricocheted off the president's limo and hit him underneath his armpit. A Secret Service agent got him into the limo and drove off, only realizing later that Reagan had been hit. He was in the hospital for twelve days, lost over half ...
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