The book opens with a bang: “In the fall of 1980, when I was 14, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was 36, 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.”
Set in New York in the 1980s, Adam Ross’s new novel, “Playworld,” tells the story of a young actor named Griffin as he navigates the chaos of the city, of his family and of being a teenager, and the dangers that swirl around each. His father is a struggling actor and his mother is a former dancer. The family is floundering financially, in part because of a devastating fire that Griffin accidentally started when he was 6 — a blaze that destroyed their home and all of their material possessions.
To help make ends meet, Griffin works as a child-star on a hit TV show, but the job distracts from both his school work and his true passion: wrestling. The sport, too, comes with its own agonies; the team’s coach sexually abuses several of the young wrestlers, including Griffin. It’s all a lot to deal with, especially for a kid, and the only one who seems to listen to him is Naomi, the very person he should avoid.
If this makes the book sound dour, it’s not. Although “Playworld” grapples with bleak material, it sparkles with Ross’s vivid eye and sardonic sense of humor. Take, for instance, Griffin’s mother’s response to finding out, decades later, about his relationship with Naomi: “But she was such an ugly woman.”
The result is a dark, off-kilter bildungsroman about one overextended teenager trying to figure himself out while being failed, continually, by every adult around him.
In April, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “Playworld,” by Adam Ross. We’ll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on April 25, and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by April 17, and we may mention your observations in the episode.
Here’s some related reading to get you started:
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Our critic Alexandra Jacobs’s review of “Playworld”: “The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in ‘Playworld,’ for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman and Garp. The novel is detailed, digressive, densely populated, dull at times (as life is) and capable of tracking the most minute shifts in emotional weather. It is the young and the restless, edging into the bold and the beautiful.” [Read the full review here.]
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Interview Magazine’s interview with Adam Ross: “In terms of the project of ‘Playworld,’ it’s a book that apes memoir. It’s also a book that, on a certain level, apes a historical novel. But what it’s really trying to do is mine a certain moment in the culture when we just didn’t have language for certain kinds of experiences. There was no language for certain kinds of experiences about predation. There was no language for certain kinds of experiences that now get tagged as narcissism or abuse.” [Read the full interview, conducted by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, here.]
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Our review of Adam Ross’s debut novel, “Mr. Peanut”: “Adam Ross’s ‘Mr. Peanut’ is a dark, dazzling and deeply flawed novel that announces the debut of an enormously talented writer. An account of three troubled marriages, the book is a Rubik’s cube of a story that reads like a postmodern mash-up of Tolstoy’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata,’ Edward Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ and one of James M. Cain’s noirish mysteries.” [Read the full review, by Michiko Kakutani, here.]
We can’t wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
The post Book Club: Read ‘Playworld,’ by Adam Ross, With the Book Review appeared first on New York Times.
