PLAYWORLD, by Adam Ross
Before “adulting,” there were grown-ups: a word even more squiggly, if you think about it, and one that in Adam Ross’s new novel, “Playworld,” takes on monstrous dimensions.
As quite a few novels have done in recent years, “Playworld” takes readers back to New York City during the waning, gentle but grayish days of the Carter administration, and watches through adolescent male eyes as America flips over to lurid Reagan technicolor.
“There you go again,” the winning candidate famously told the loser during their second debate. “As if it were off the cuff,” thinks the protagonist of “Playworld,” the pointedly named Griffin Hurt (symbol of urban protection, conjoined with the consequence of its failures). “I knew a canned line when I heard one.”
That’s because Griffin is, like Reagan, an actor. Gifted but conflicted, he has done commercials for Oscar Mayer bologna and Lipton Cup-a-Soup and been cast in a movie with Jill Clayburgh and Shelley Duvall. He puts on a cape to play Peter Proton in a popular Saturday morning TV series, a scientific spoof called “The Nuclear Family” — “before we fought bad guys, we’d summon our powers by yelling, ‘Split up!’” — and his wages go toward the tuition for his fancy Upper West Side private school.
Financially unstable, Griffin’s own nuclear family is also threatening to split up. His father, born Sheldon Hertzberg, is a probable philanderer and a bit of a sad sack: a less successful actor who brags about his voice-over work for movies like “Star Wars” and “Superman,” and about the free checking and savings accounts he receives from the bank where he’s a spokesman. Griffin’s mother, Lily, is a former professional dancer who now teaches ballet and Pilates, and there’s an oft-swatted away younger brother, Oren.
Following an apartment fire when Griffin was 6, for which he feels horribly responsible, everyone sees the same psychologist, who also happens to be a family friend. Boundaries are not exactly abounding. It’s a time of squeegee men, prank calls and missing minors on milk cartons. Benign neglect is the norm.
So is malignant attention. There are two outright predators in “Playworld.” One of them is another family friend, the unhappily married Naomi Shah, who at the psychologist’s 40th wedding-anniversary party takes an interest in Griffin that turns quickly, shockingly carnal, leading to a series of encounters in her Mercedes and elsewhere. She is 36, he is 14, and Mary Kay Letourneau has not yet made national news.
The other is the wrestling coach at Griffin’s school, who alternates humiliating weigh-ins with sweaty private “practice” sessions in the gym or at his apartment. There’s a gift of kneepads, which Griffin keeps in his locker, along with Hermès ties from Naomi.
Aspiring to be a comic-book artist, Griffin escapes into an elaborate Dungeons & Dragons campaign, mapping a mythical Griffynweld that resembles his city and its environs, and fantasizes about having a girlfriend his own age, though with Naomi’s auntish capacity to listen.
It’s not the play that’s the thing in “Playworld” — a gorgeous cat’s cradle of a book that sometimes unravels into shaggy-dog stories — but the lines, in every sense of the word. The marketing taglines that bear the same force and resonance as elders’ aphorisms: 1010 WINS, American Express, Calgon. The lines between juveniles and adults blurring and being crossed. And Ross’s own refined lines, his powers of observation and ironclad resistance to cliché yielding perfect descriptions again and again. A crowd of Nightingale-Bamford girls makes “a sound between laughter and slaughter, as if the school itself were shouting.” Central Park is “that mood ring in the middle of Manhattan.” By the grace of Ross’s language, even a seasick sailor’s trail of vomit descending off a warship into the ocean takes on — I swear it — a certain crystalline beauty.
The title conjures so much: the theater’s “world of the play” (Shel is cast in a big disaster of a musical; Griffin will flirt with Shakespeare); the imaginary realms of the child; the sybaritic escapes of the grown-up; and the scheme of a novel itself, in which realistic characters — Ross has said the story is semi-autobiographical — can at whim be twisted and placed into ridiculous positions. During one domestic dispute, part of someone’s pinkie gets severed by a door jamb, bounces into a koi pond and is quickly devoured by a carp. A letter opener goes right through another character’s palm.
But Ross — who published the complex and dastardly novel “Mr. Peanut” in 2010 and a book of short stories soon after, then took on the editorship of The Sewanee Review, delaying this project — keeps such darkly slapstick moments to a minimum. (Maybe every sophomore novelist should be tasked with reviving a moribund literary journal?) The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in “Playworld,” for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman and Garp. The novel is detailed, digressive, densely populated, dull at times (as life is) and capable of tracking the most minute shifts in emotional weather. It is the young and the restless, edging into the bold and the beautiful.
PLAYWORLD | By Adam Ross | Knopf | 506 pp. | $29
