Playworld

A Novel

By: Adam Ross

Narrated by: Adam Ross

"Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Line for line the book is a revelation." —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, PEOPLE, AND TOWN & COUNTRY • NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE WASHINGTON POST • A MULANEY READS BOOK CLUB PICK • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut

“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.”

Griffin 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.

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.

The analogies and descriptions.

Insights into psychology and description of growing up in the city weee so realistic and insightful .

Adam Ross is a master.

Its official - I will read anything this man writes. I enjoyed his narration, as well.

Enjoyable book marred by narration.

Adam Ross does his book no favors by narrating it himself. He has an unfortunate habit of turning simple sentences into two, three or four word phrases. It is a very annoying habit.

Wow. A Gen X Must-Read

There are all kinds of memes out there that try to make light of what it was like to grow up in a generation whose parents famously left us to parents ourselves and get home “before the street lights came on” without bothering them too much in-between. At times, while reading, I found myself feeling nostalgic for the freedom and independence that kind of parenting style afforded us (or, as a parent myself (now), how freeing it might have been to be less entrenched in the claustrophobic parenting style we adopted when raising our own). I liked the story’s resistance of nostalgia, even though its set-design is littered with surprisingly wonderful ephemera (Charlie perfume, Members Only Jackets,—InTelevision!). But nostalgia is just memory without the pain, right? Playworld obliterates any “good old days” tropes (thank God). It seduces us into taking a peek backstage and punctuates scenes with their unfettered pain that often accompany actions in verboten spaces. I, for one, felt validated by the discomfort that never gets airtime—especially in the coming-of-age genre epic.

Ross’ book is populated with characters who emulate the complications that arise when the power dynamics of order are less defined by expectations by positions of authority (parent/child; teacher/student, coach/player; older/younger sibling; doctor/patient; president/constituent) while raising uncomfortable questions about power itself through the experiences of people who endured the fallout from switching positions. I was particularly moved by his portrayals of vulnerability; his characters regularly defied tired gender tropes of strength and weakness. Are you strong because you endure pain without bothering your parents? What does it mean for a father to rely on his children to pay his family’s rent? Doesn’t every young man secretly lust over a teacher, a friend’s mom, a mother’s friend? A disciplined athlete follows directions from his coach, but what if that coach manipulates his position for his own weaknesses? Shouldn’t a young man’s masculinity be elevated to hero level if he achieves these fantasy positions so early in his life? I loved the story’s resistance to all of these questions. And though it took a long time to write, somehow the timing of its publication seems perfect. The prose is downright gorgeous, and the imagery hits all of the senses: music (operatic to jingles), scent (the inside of a rubber suit to L’air du Temps), sight (his description of sailors’ eel-ing vomit will stay with me), touch (too many to list—the scary & the sensual), and taste—really—hunger. The denial and gorging of food left me breathless (and hungry).

This is such a big book. I’m still trying to process it. I loved the way Ross read it and marveled at his capacity to capture the intense and quiet moments with perfect tension/tenor. I know it is semi-autobiographical and often wondered what parts were difficult to read out loud; which parts may have felt righteous. I was genuinely sad when it ended, and I hope he writes a sequel—with a request that it comes out a bit sooner than Playworld did!

I didn’t want it to end

The voice the story the vocabulary were all beautiful.
I was sad when it came to the end.