Playworld: A Novel

by Adam Ross

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Sharp and immersive, Playworld is an engrossing novel that takes readers into the heart of family dysfunction and coming-of-age in 1980s New York City.

"Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Line for line the book is a revelation." —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut

“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.”

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385351300
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/07/2025
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	68,831
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

ADAM ROSS is the author of Mr. Peanut, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He has been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review. Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

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.

Two decades later, when I finally told my mother—we were on Long Island, taking a walk on the beach—she stopped, stunned, and said, “But she was such an ugly woman.” The remark wasn’t as petty as it sounds. If I was aware of it then, it neither repulsed me nor affected my feelings for Naomi. It was just a thing I took for granted, like the color of her hair.

Wiry and ashen, it had the shading but not the shimmer of pigeon feathers. Naomi kept it long, so that it fell past her shoulders. I knew it by touch, for my face was often buried in it. Only later did I wonder if she considered herself unattractive, because she always wore sunglasses, as if to hide her face, large gold frames with blue-tinted prescription lenses. When we were driving together, which was often that year, she’d allow these to slide down her nose and then look at me over their bridge. She might’ve considered this pose winning, but it was more likely to see me better. Her mouth often hung slightly open. Her lower teeth were uneven, and her tongue, which pressed against them, always tasted of coffee.

Naomi’s car was a silver Mercedes sedan—300sd along with turbo diesel nickel-plated on the back—that made a deep hum when she drove. The interior, enormous in my mind’s eye, was tricked out with glossy wood paneling and white leather, back seat so wide and legroom so ample they made the driver appear to be far away. It was in this car that Naomi and I talked most often. We’d park, and then she’d lean across the armrest to press her cheek to mine, and I’d sometimes allow her to kiss me. Other times we’d move to the back. Lying there with Naomi, her nose nuzzled to my neck, I’d stare at the ceiling’s dotted fabric until the pattern seemed to detach and drift like a starred sky. This car was her prized possession, and like many commuters, she had turned the machine into an extension of her body. Her left thumb lightly hooked the wheel at eight o’clock when traffic was moving, her fingertips sliding to eleven when it was slow. She preferred to sit slightly reclined, her free hand spread on her inner thigh, though after she lost her pinky the following summer, and even after being fitted with a prosthesis, she kept it tucked away.

“I was worried you’d think it was disgusting,” she said, the digit hidden between the seat and her hip. She’d bought herself a diamond ring to hide the seam, and for the most part the likeness was uncanny, but at certain angles you could tell—the cuticle’s line was too smooth, the nail’s pale crescent too creamy to match the others. Like my father’s fake teeth, which he occasionally left lying around our apartment, I was fascinated by it, though my curiosity wasn’t morbid. I was a child actor, you see, a student of all forms of dissembling, and had long ago found my greatest subject to be adults.

Editorial Reviews

09/30/2024

Family dysfunction and the challenges of adolescence lie at the heart of this compulsively readable outing from Ross (Mr. Peanut). In the book’s most salacious and impactful plot thread, narrator Griffin Hurt looks back with vivid detail and analytical compassion on his teen years in the 1980s, beginning with the affair he had at 14 with family friend Naomi Shah, 22 years his senior. Other story lines delve into Griffin’s career as a child actor and his time on the high school wrestling team. Though the affair ends midway through the novel, Naomi’s friendship with Griffin’s parents, who don’t know about the affair, causes him continued distress. Ross also offers a poignant depiction of the pressure Griffin faces in show business, as his father urges him to take an audition with renowned director Paul Mazursky, whom Griffin’s never heard of, while he’d prefer to focus on wrestling. Ross casts the period in a dark light, touching on the turbulence of such historical episodes as the Iran hostage crisis and the Reagan assassination attempt and laying bare the moral emptiness of the adults in Griffin’s life. Readers will enjoy getting caught up in this sharp, discursive narrative. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year . . . Playworld presents us with a story dipped in molten nostalgia and flecked with love and sorrow . . . A bildungsroman from which anger has been vented, and what’s left behind is redolent with insight, tenderness and forgiveness . . . The narrator’s voice is an extraordinary hybrid of a boy’s plaintive innocence and a man’s wry reflection . . . Somehow, Ross can recall high school with enough fidelity to re-create on the page that visceral feeling of utter bafflement at the behavior of adults. But nothing baffles Ross as a narrator. His powers of observation and sensation seem to invade every nook of these lives like the tentacles of some giant octopus with consciousness in every sucker . . . There’s not a dull line, and yet his prose doesn’t feel like a Christmas tree so freighted with baubles that the branches risk shearing off . . . Whatever past rough experiences Ross may be mining here, they’ve been compressed under the pressure of time and genius into a cluster of literary gems . . . Such is the stuff great novels are made on." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post (cover review)

"A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . [Ross's] powers of observation and ironclad resistance to cliché yield perfect descriptions again and again . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, 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." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Ross is so adept at world-building that we are seduced by his vision of the Big Apple as wholly enchanting and mystical . . . I didn’t want it to end. The story is so rich and filled with intriguing—if morally questionable—characters that it’s immersive. Line for line the book is a revelation." —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

“Charming…Affecting…[Ross] is a spry, funny, inventive writer…Another mark of the book’s freshness is that, even though it contains all the ingredients for a mopey story of formative traumas, Playworld never sheds its winsome optimism.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Engrossing . . . Things come to a head one fateful summer as, amid personal and family tumult, the maturing Griffin begins to inhabit his most important role: himself." —The New Yorker

“Dazzling and endearing . . . Gorgeously textured and frequently very funny, [Playworld] revels in all the heady, scuzzy, confusing bits of coming of age.” —Vogue ("The Best Books of 2025")

"A marvel of language and characterization . . . Playworld conjures, in beautiful sentences, a bygone New York, when money and culture linked arms, recalling Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and David Gilbert's & Sons . . . [Ross's] sharp prose fleshes out even minor figures, [and] erotic tensions keep the narrative taut, disquieting, off-balance." —Hamilton Cain, The Boston Globe

“Best book I’ve read in the past year and maybe the past decade. It’s Salinger-meets-Donna-Tartt-meets-your-long-ago-crush-on-Shaun-Cassidy. . . . Eleven out of ten recommend.” —Elin Hilderbrand, bestselling author of Swan Song, on Instagram

"Ross artfully brings [1980s Manhattan] to life, capturing its seductive pull and the darker currents underneath . . . Playworld delivers a gripping coming-of-age tale, whilst offering a chance to reflect on the era's lasting cultural mystique and the complexities of growing up in its shadow." —Clementine Doyle, Women.com

“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." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“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.” —Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans

“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.” —Harlan Coben, author of Think Twice

"A modern masterpiece, sharp and breathtaking and wise. Griffin, the young man at the center of this vivid bildungsroman, is someone you’d follow forward and backward and anywhere—across the sweaty mats of the high schoolwrestling team into a steamed-up car for a wildly sexy and heartbreakinglyhuman relationship with an older, married woman, and then into the glittering world of child acting. Remarkable." —Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“Compulsively readable.” —Publishers Weekly

"It's difficult to overpraise Playworld’s tragicomic scope, dazzling ambition,categorical brilliance. Ross writes so close to the bone that I winced while reading. And while young Griffin is brutalized and betrayed by the adults putting him through his sentimental education, Playworld is never hopeless. It instead reinforces our faith in art, that it can make and save a life. I have not read a book this weighty and soulful since I put it down, and I doubt I will again." —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

“What do you say about a book this good? In its unsentimental scrutinizing of a boy put to use by the adults around him—the coach, the family friend, the family shrink—Playworld is a revelation. Griffin Hurt’s life is so real it glows.” —Matthew Klam, author of Who Is Rich?

"Few writers are blessed enough to write an untouchable book. Adam Ross is one of them. Set during a trickle-down 80s we are now ready to make sense of, Playworld will have you so convincingly wrapped up in young Griffin’s world of romance and anxiety that you will pine for lost days. Patient, propulsive, spooled with Nabokovian detail, this novel broke open my heart’s floodgates in the way that the best literature does." —Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

“Playworld just about tore my heart out. In this novel about a child actor, it’s tough to know who’s doing most of the acting, young Griffin, the protagonist, or the adults who surround him and seem determined to break him to pieces. This is a big book, one about growing up. By the time I finished, I felt like I’d also done some growing up alongside Griffin. Adam Ross is a hell of a talent.” —Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing

“Playworld is the story not so much of a sentimental education as a plunge into the deep end of adulthood. Adam Ross has given us a masterful novel, one that deftly sets Griffin Hurt's coming of age amid the rise of Reagan and the get-mine-first ethos that would come to characterize so much of American life in the coming decades. This novel is, in short, the world in full, and flat-out brilliant on every page.” —Ben Fountain, author of Devil Makes Three

"Griffin Hurt is a teenage narrator as fully realized and fumbling for meaning as William Styron’s ever-searching Stingo, and is destined to become one of the twenty-first century’s most beloved protagonists. You don’t just fall in love with him, you’re transformed into a kind of devoted surrogate parent. Playworld is a marvel." —Hannah Pittard, author of Listen to Me

"In this magnificent novel, Adam Ross pulls off a literary hat trick: Playworld is at once an elegy for a very particular time and place, an intimate portrait of one family that then sweeps the reader into a multitude of fascinating worlds, and a tour-de-force of a coming of age story with an unforgettable boy at its center. I loved it.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires

“An epic bildungsroman . . . While Griffin comes to understand the abuses inflicted on him, Ross' novel is free of lessons, as unjudging as poor Griffin, who can do nothing but weather the loss of innocence we can all see overtaking him like a cloud. Ross offers surprising narrative flights, stunning passages, and a nostalgia-soaked setting in so-real-you're there, bygone New York City.” —Annie Bostrom, Booklist

From the Publisher

2024-09-28
A teen actor in 1980 Manhattan grapples with the consequences of fame, his eccentric family, and the advances of a family friend.

This long-awaited follow-up toMr. Peanut (2010) and the well-received story collectionLadies and Gentlemen (2011) chronicles a season of upheaval in the life of a child actor on the cusp of adulthood. It offers a blast to the past in the vein of Garth Risk Hallberg’sCity on Fire (2015) and the existential angst of Donna Tartt’sThe Goldfinch (2013), but lacks much in the way of pathos. The book is written from the point of view of Griffin Hurt, an otherwise ordinary prep school student whose actor father pressured him into show business. What’s meant to make Griffin unique is his role as popular Peter Proton on an NBC show calledThe Nuclear Family, but we barely see any of those experiences. Instead, the show and its accompanying fame serve as an albatross around Griffin’s neck that interferes with his true passion: wrestling for the school team. Meanwhile, Griffin’s parents are distant and self-absorbed, while his younger brother, Oren, although personable, mostly exists as a sounding board and partner in crime for Griffin. Instead, Ross pulls his inciting incident straight fromThe Graduate with the introduction of Naomi Shah, an older friend of Griffin’s parents whose unhappy marriage and impulsive tendencies lead her toward predation. As Griffin lies through sessions with the family therapist and his storied career threatens to derail his own ambitions, his avoidance mirrors the novel’s narrative pitfall: plenty of movement but no real change. With no true villain and nowhere for the story to go, readers may find themselves anxiously awaiting a climax that never comes.

An intriguing coming-of-age story that’s rich in atmosphere but falls short on resolution.

Kirkus Reviews