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A Novel
by John F. RossGriffin 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.
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.
If you liked Playworld, try these:
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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