An 18-hour flight seemed the perfect opportunity to make headway on Adam Ross’s eagerly anticipated, 500-page coming-of-age novel Playworld. Weighing half my allowable cabin luggage, its publication comes fully 15 years after his acclaimed, darkly comic Mr Peanut, about a video game designer whose wife is found dead with peanuts lodged in her throat; and his lauded 2011 story collection, Ladies and Gentleman.
All I knew about it was that it had generated substantial literary buzz – Ross is the longtime editor of the literary juggernaut The Sewanee Review – was set in New York City in the 1980s, and was about a 14-year-old child actor who is seduced by his mother’s best friend.
With its cover photo of a woman’s hands caressing the back of a young man’s head, I expected the book to be a rapid-fire au courant explication of an older woman’s erotic fulfillment with a much younger man. The idea is in the air: in Miranda July’s recent blockbuster novel, All Fours, Catherine Breillat’s sensual French confection, Last Summer, and Nicole Kidman’s daring star turn in Babygirl.
Once 35,000 feet in the air, I read Playworld’s first paragraph: “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.”
It took that flight and an additional two weeks for me to slog through the first half of the narrative before I realised that what I was expecting to read, and what Playworld was brilliantly executing, were two different phenomena. I should have known by its weight alone that Ross’s novel was closer in spirit and intention to Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield than to Marguerite Duras’ 1984 autobiographical novel The Lover. Perhaps the best way to explain this unusual reading experience is in musical terms. I had to slow my reading from allegro con vivace to adagio. The risqué affair is not the novel’s focus but the arc that spans the immersive world it contains.
That world is Griffin Hurt’s wistfully nostalgic remembrance of things past: Manhattan in the 1980s rising like a phoenix from its near obliteration in the 1970s; the nation emerging from the inflated gas prices and relentless Iranian hostage crisis of Jimmy Carter’s presidency to Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill”. Manhattan was gleaming with new condominium builds and the lustre of celebrity sightings at Studio 54. Playworld is set at that moment after the deluge and before the Aids epidemic blighted the beautiful young men inhaling poppers as they discoed until dawn.
Griffin is a child actor who rises before the sun to play Peter Proton on a superhero television sitcom filming at 30 Rockefeller Center, then attends Boyd Prep, an elite private school paid for by his thespian wages. At Boyd, he grapples with bullies, Shakespeare and his real passion: competitive wrestling.
His dissembling family seems a relic frozen in a time when the middle class could still afford a cramped but secure apartment on the Upper West Side. His father, Sheldon, is a trained opera singer who earns his living as a voiceover artist. Mother Lily is a former ballet dancer who teaches private Pilates sessions. His younger brother, Oren, with whom he shares a shimmering tension, also wrestles but attends a different private school.
Both boys run free through Manhattan’s fierce streets – free of helicopter parents and the paranoia that will beset the next generation. Griffin is worldly but naive, easily impressed by the glittering wealth and beauty proffered by his busy metropolis.
There are no boundaries between adult and children in this constellation where the entire Hurt family see Elliot, their psychotherapist, either singularly or as a group; as do Naomi and her husband Sam Shah – Elliot is a social friend to them all.
There is a sinister grooming aspect to Boyd Prep’s wrestling coach, Keppleman, who brings his stars to a gloomy, locked basement room for personal workouts.
Naomi’s seduction of Griffin begins as she waits in her idling Mercedes for her daughters, studying dance at the nearby Juilliard performing arts school. Seeing Griffin walking home, she offers him a ride then takes him to a dead end parking lot below a highway where their relationship develops from confidence to consolation to caresses.
Then Griffin is cast in the great New York director Hornbeam’s latest film. On the verge of stardom, he finally makes serious choices of his own. The child becomes the man. Griffin reflects, “Adults … were the ocean in which I swam.”
In real life, Ross played Alan Alda’s son in the political drama The Seduction of Joe Tynan, and was also a New York State high school wrestling champ. Those experiences inform the novel without tainting it with the brush of autofiction.
His insightful and elegant descriptions of the art of wrestling include some of the best sports writing I have read.
So slow down, take your time, understand that Playworld’s breadth is a strength and not a distraction, reminiscent of novels written when time was abundant and not fractured into pixels.
Playword: A Novel, by Adam Ross (Knopf, $59.99 hb), is out now.
