Adam Ross’ long-awaited sophomore novel, Playworld, transports readers to early 80’s New York, a crucial moment in the life of Griffin Hurt, a successful child actor. The novel begins, “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.”
Forced into the acting game to pay his high school tuition and follow in the footsteps of his father—an unfulfilled voice actor whose earnings have been surpassed by his young son—Griffin is thrown into the complex world of adults who all want a piece of him. Griffin finds himself caught between the adult realm of his demanding acting schedule, liaisons with Naomi, and the intricate politics of his parents marriage, and the childhood realm of wrestling, school, and age-appropriate crushes. But even his pursuit of a normal teenage lifestyle is tainted by the behavior of adults: his wrestling coach is abusing him both physically and emotionally, a very different but similarly insidious form of Naomi’s forceful desire.
Throughout the novel, the reader begins to understand just how little agency Griffin has in his own life, even in comparison to the 14 year-olds around him. While Griffin’s parents take relatively little interest in his comings and goings, the adults in his life exert overwhelming pressures on him emotionally, psychologically, and practically. Unlike many children his age, it seems that Griffin has more adults relying on him for their needs than he has people to rely on for his own needs. As he races from rehearsals to school, to wrestling practice, to Naomi’s Mercedes, to his tempestuous family home—the novel unravels as Griffin loses control of his life.
Griffin’s narrative is inseparable from the specific Manhattan he inhabits, an early 80’s in which the damn of the Reagan era spells a drastic social change for many American families. Where better for a precariously independent kid to grow up than an urban landscape that contains all manner of possibility for a young person. Ross’s vision of the city is such a magnetic part of the novel, with descriptions from Griffin’s perspective such as: “It was the diorama hour, when evening is just beginning to descend and everything is brilliant and discrete. When the city seems scrimshawed on a lit bulb.” Readers will find that the hyper-realism of Griffin’s world and the specificity of the emotions he experiences will stay with them for an extended period of time after completing the novel; Ross’ lengthy novel is worth the wait and about as compelling as coming-of-age stories come.