BookBrowse Reviews Playworld by Adam Ross

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In Playworld, a child actor navigates the confusing, ambiguous worlds of high school, movie sets, adult affairs, and his disintegrating family.

Adam Ross's ambitious novel Playworld follows Griffin, a high school freshman living in New York City in 1980, over the course of a busy and formative year. The setup is intriguing, if a bit overstuffed: Griffin is a reluctant child actor, a cast member on a sitcom called The Nuclear Family about a family that, after radiation exposure, become superheroes. His early morning schedule means that he's often late for school and behind on assignments, but his parents, especially his actor father, pressure him to keep working, partly to pay for his expensive private school and partly because Griffin has a natural talent and a serious shot at being a real actor, in real movies, with real fame.

Surprisingly, Griffin's life as a television star is not the focus of Playworld—or rather, there are so many other narrative threads, often compartmentalized in set piece-like chapters, that there are large swathes of the novel in which one forgets Griffin has this job. Long sections of the first half are devoted to Griffin's high school wrestling career, his main priority at school: "If English was my favorite class, wrestling was my life," he says. As Griffin dissects wrestling moves, provides play-by-plays of his matches, and describes the weekly challenge of making weight—going days without eating (and sometimes without drinking water), and donning a rubber suit to sweat out excess water weight—Playworld transforms into a (great) sports novel.

Behind the scenes, the wrestling coach, Keppleman, is abusive and creepy, and has scared his players into submission and silence. He takes each of the boys aside to "roll" one-on-one on a secret mat in the school's boiler room; he doesn't wear underwear under his shorts at practice; and he starts Griffin at the 121-pound weight class even though Griffin naturally weighs 130, which eventually leads Griffin's mom to report him (she realizes Keppleman is knowingly letting her son starve himself, but his larger crimes remain secret). "I experienced no fear of being overmatched or overwhelmed, but I suffered instead of the vague, humiliated sense of being subjected," Griffin says about wrestling with his coach. "Why did I do this? I often wonder now. Why did I not simply say no?" (This is no A Little Life, though—this plotline, too, is mostly confined to a few chapters.)

Griffin is behind in his classes, struggling on the wrestling mat, and generally overbooked; when his friend asks him if he's in trouble after his teacher fails him for plagiarizing, he "wasn't sure how to answer, 'trouble' being more of an environment in which I existed than a temporary state." In the midst of this turmoil, when it feels like something has to give and yet nothing will, he starts spending time with his parents' friend Naomi Shah. They regularly meet on the street and then hang out in her car in a secluded parking lot, cuddling and kissing and confiding in each other.

The parallels to Keppleman are explicit—both are pathetic figures, at least in the eyes of the reader, who want something from Griffin that they shouldn't. And Griffin does feel with Naomi echoes of the disgust and obligation he feels with his coach, even though he also feels genuine attraction, affection, and curiosity. Griffin's whole thing is that he is attuned to the behavior of adults, always studying them, noticing when they are lying (he calls it acting), trying to understand their behavior. The sad and inevitable part of Playworld is that the adults in his life don't understand him in the same way, either because he's such a good actor or because they don't want to. During one encounter, in which Naomi starts crying about their relationship, Griffin "didn't know what I wanted, but I knew exactly what was being asked of me," and dutifully kisses her until she stops crying.

In this environment, Griffin fumbles around, partly trying to figure out what it means to be a good person in the absence of moral instruction—although he doesn't try very hard or think very deeply about it—but mostly concerned with passing his classes, making weight, memorizing his lines, and getting a girlfriend. About halfway through the book, his priorities are almost systematically replaced: wrestling season is over, and he discovers Dungeons & Dragons as a new passion; instead of filming The Nuclear Family, he scores a role in a movie from a Woody Allen-like director; and instead of hanging out with Naomi, he falls in love with a high schooler named Amanda, who attends school across the street from the movie set.

Griffin's relationship with Amanda is the good stuff of fourteen-year-old boy fiction, familiar but heartfelt, and richly drawn. Griffin has a huge crush on her, they become friends, and she strings him along for a bit before admitting that she has a boyfriend, a cool senior who attends Griffin's school and doesn't treat her very well. (Both of Amanda's parents tell Griffin that she has terrible taste in men and doesn't like him because he's too nice.) In a painfully awkward chapter, Griffin misreads Amanda's tepid invitation to her family's Long Island beach house and goes to meet her, where he's cruelly ignored all weekend until he leaves in shame.

Playworld reads more like a collection of these set pieces than one coherent narrative. Some of them are really interesting, like the one at Amanda's beach house, or one in which Griffin visits an aunt and uncle with his family for Christmas, where Griffin's younger brother Oren shocks everyone by riding their cousin's seemingly untamable horse: "His movements were so practiced, and so alien to me, that he might just as well have folded and then paneled a parachute," Griffin says. "It was an odd moment…further evidence that my brother had a life apart from me and the family about which I knew next to nothing."

Another chapter, riveting and detailed, tells the story of Griffin's father: his career as a navy photographer, and then his experience getting his teeth knocked out by the mob in an effort to rescue the girl he loved. (Griffin's father is, I think, the best and most well-drawn character in the novel: a struggling actor, trained in opera and stuck doing radio ads; vain and proud and philandering, unable to admit when he's made a mistake, and utterly embarrassing to his two sons.) Chapters that feature Griffin's family of four—loving, artistic, but uneasy and mistrustful—tend to be strong; those that feature his friends, who barely if at all rise above teenage boy archetypes, tend to fall flat. There's something kind of "map as big as the territory" about Playworld—all these long, slow-moving scenes, in which very few narratively exciting things happen but which gradually add up to a formative year. It's an interesting structure, and it mostly works.

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: "As Amanda listened, a shyness left her features that made her appear older"; "Abe Fountain, whom Mom knew I recognized and simply glanced at me as the applause rose in response, walked on last"; "There remained in the giant, flimsy pan only a third of the food left, its aluminum buckling and deformed." I'm not being nitpicky for the sake of it—there's something sloppy and imprecise about this writing, made worse by the impression it tries to give off of being carefully considered, even erudite.

Beyond sloppiness, there is an annoying faux profundity in this style and in Griffin's thoughts. At Christmas with his cousins, Griffin thinks about seeing them next year: "How would my life be different then? It was, I quickly concluded, impossible to know." Talking to his cousin's girlfriend while his cousin is gone, he thinks, "If Leo were here, I would never have considered talking to Bridget like this. I was talking to Bridget like this, I thought, because she was Bridget." For all the emotion and vibrancy of this story, it seemed to me, quite often, that Ross genuinely had very little to say. Driving around wealthy New York suburbs, Griffin thinks to himself, "What to do with such plenty? What to make of such wealth? How to live your life?" Ross seems unable to get his characters to say anything interesting, anything of significance, so they simply give up: they ask questions they don't even attempt to answer and that the book does not attempt to answer; they shrug a lot; even Griffin's psychologist, Elliott, falls asleep during Griffin's sessions, and when Griffin does open up to him years later and Elliott starts to give him real advice, Griffin says, he never finishes it, "because he and I ran out of time." Maybe this is supposed to be comedy, or simply realism, but it reads as a cop-out. 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.

This review first ran in the January 15, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.