Playworld, author Adam Ross’s long-awaited second novel (his first, Mr. Peanut, was published in 2010), starts off with a narrative bang: “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.” Indeed, nothing seems all that “strange” to our very likable narrator, Griffin Hurt, in the same way that many people think their crazy families are normal because it’s all they know, until they either leave home or start therapy.
As that opening promises, Griffin experiences a lifetime of damage and blind endurance crammed into one extremely long, harrowing year. At 14, he is a successful actor by accident, having lucked into an enormous native talent he shrugs off as a combo of filial duty (his father is also a performer), a propensity for de-personalization, and a survival skill.
Griffin plays the role of Peter Proton on a Saturday-morning TV series called The Nuclear Family, which kind of makes him famous. His character’s exposure to radiation gives him oddball powers; the show’s popularity gives real-life Griffin the power to pay his own tuition at a private school with a nasty predilection for hiring and tolerating sexual offenders and sadists—a reliable staple of late-20th-century New York City mores.
In this manner, as a breadwinner and potential movie star, the kid outstrips his narcissistic father, Shel, who struggles to support the rest of the family by doing voice-overs and jingles of the household-product variety while craving meatier roles. “Give to the Negro College Fund,” Shel’s mellifluous baritone booms, “because a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Dad is everywhere at once, and nowhere.
Griffin’s mom is a former ballerina who works part-time as a Pilates-and-dance instructor and is getting her master’s in literature, simply because that’s how she wants to spend her days. Fights about money and infidelity abound. Because this all takes place during the early 80s, parents are scarcely aware of their children—it’s the fashion of the day in a latchkey city. (Spoiler alert: during a period of separation, the Hurts send Griffin to live with said pedophile Naomi Shah and her manic and violent husband.)
All four Hurts—there is a loyal younger brother, Oren, with built-in street smarts and no over-obvious aptitudes—see the same therapist, who is also Shel’s best friend, Elliot. This, too, rings true for the time period—I’m a native New Yorker myself, six years older than Griffin, and my dad was a psychiatrist, and everyone treated everyone else’s offspring back then. This is something which makes my current shrink say, “My jaw is hitting the floor.” But I digress.
Nothing seems all that “strange” to our very likable narrator, Griffin Hurt, in the same way that many people think their crazy families are normal because it’s all they know, until they either leave home or start therapy.
Adam Ross, a remarkably gifted and generous writer, digresses, too. Enough to lose some of the wind in his narratorial sails. Certainly there is plenty of material in the opening sentences to propel a story forward. If there weren’t, there is also a fact we learn a bit further along in the crowded beginning: that, at the age of six, Griffin accidentally burned the apartment down and killed a “member of the family,” whose mysterious identity is revealed around page 20, again deflating what was presumably meant to be an alternative source of narrative pressure. What I’m saying is that there is a lot going on in this kid’s privileged but sorely deprived upbringing, enough to weave a gripping story.
But out of fairness to the folks, perhaps, both parents get long stretches of backstory that diminish the story’s tension quite a bit and encourage us to understand their transgressions. (Sorry, no!)
Meanwhile, Griffin’s passion for high-school wrestling keeps us away from the child-stardom and family-shrink threads for so long that I kept wondering what happened to them. These digressions winded me—although the wrestling sequence could have had a starring role. They also keep Griffin psychically floating above his body in a consistent stupor, as he unflappably performs in whichever arena he is plopped into.
After all the adults who have failed him so spectacularly are finished, Griffin cannot even feel his own toes emotionally. He stays amiable and strangely blank to a fault. “A prince,” someone’s mother calls him. Surely these symptoms are linked to the sexual depravity and grooming he’s been subjected to; to misquote Emily Dickinson on pain, his character “has an element of blank.”
In a memoir, there might be a better reckoning for them, but in this novel, it sometimes feels the writer has lost his authorial focus. Why all the details on Shel’s long-lost love, for example? Or the parents of Griffin’s crush? Is this a novel about a budding wrestler whose diligence and self-abnegation plus abuse resemble the trials of the dancer Gelsey Kirkland, a prima ballerina of the same time period? Or the effects of Mrs. Robinson on a mere sophomore in high school? Both?
The result is a loose, baggy, moving, discursive, sporadically gripping, sad, too-democratic novel by a compassionate and graceful writer. One more story line: Our young hero falls in love with a “torture girl,” as my husband used to call them/me. Someone whose own home life is fairly impossible, so she gives as good as she gets. This section of the book, more immersive, broke my hard readerly heart.
A childhood like this one might have given birth to a deviant serial killer. Instead, we and Griffin both—perhaps because he is so natively blessed and unfailingly forgiving—look forward to his future, which surprisingly looms brightly. In the end, I guess, this is how members of some families survive. The kid carries on.
Helen Schulman is a New York City–based writer and professor. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Lucky Dogs, named one of Oprah’s 10 Best Novels of 2023
