It took Adam Ross more than ten years to write the novel Playworld and little wonder; the 500pp title is a tour de force, offering acute, compassionate and unparalleled insight into the pain so often involved in coming of age. Although the novel is set in 1980s Manhattan, the story has a universality that will resonate with anyone who’s gone through the storms of puberty, no matter their nationality or location. In other words, just about all of us.
A married woman
The 14-year-old protagonist, Griffin, suffers more than most teenagers, enduring actual sexual abuse not only from his (male) wrestling coach but also from a married woman twenty-two years his senior. The latter cuts a predatory and memorable character as she stalks him from inside her heated Mercedes.
When he’s not fending off predators, Griffin is supporting his family by playing a character named Peter Proton on hit TV show The Nuclear Family, a title that reminds us with tongue-in-cheek humour of how these issues can and, unfortunately, do affect all too many of us.
Sweating off weight
The other activity Griffin (his surname, tellingly, is Hurt) is allowed to pursue is wrestling, possibly another metaphor reinforcing the poor guy’s struggles. Here, as elsewhere, the boy suffers badly, with the pages detailing his attempts to lose weight to qualify for a match some of the most harrowing in a novel that does not shy away from darkness. Griffin dons a rubber suit to encourage his body to sweat off weight, dines on little more than a solitary ice cube and on one occasion only consumes enough fizzy drink to wet his mouth before spitting it out again.
At moments we find ourselves forgetting Griffin’s youth until we see subtle reminders, for example when his dad (likeable) is preparing his son’s breakfast cereal and when the lad is worrying about his homework. Ross allows readers to deduce what’s happening for themselves, with little authorial intrusion.
Kissing the girl
Unlike the voracious Naomi, the girl Griffin does like treats him with a disdain verging on cruelty; I felt cross with her on his behalf. Poor Griffin finds himself too nervous to kiss her when she briefly warms to him and, instead, whiles away his time spinning fantasies.
Here is Griffin dreaming about his ideal girlfriend.
“I once again tried to imagine the perfect girl. I’d screen-tested with Brooke Shields once; I was playing her younger brother in the scene, and she was so tall I was practically looking up at her chin. In my fantasy, I ignored this fact. I pretended she had relatives in Manassas, she called to me from one of the fairway-facing houses like we sometimes did to Grandma and Grandpa when they were playing golf, she came running out to join me and then she and I walked the course’s entirety together, her mitten in my leather glove, our understanding of each other’s souls so perfect we need not utter a word.”
Innocent fantasies
We feel for Griffin because Ross can understand and replicate with such precision how young people, male and female, of whatever nationality or era, really do dream about their love object. With infinite gentleness, Ross encourages us to identify with his protagonist Griffin by showing us the boy’s innocent fantasies.
With accuracy and sensitivity, Ross also describes the guilty compliance abuse victims so often experience in relation to their abusers. “At least three times a week Coach Keppelmen [highly abusive] wanted to roll. Why did I do this? I often wonder now. Why did I not simply say no. Was it because our ritual, established since seventh grade, was so prescribed in its motions – was, from the start, the norm – that I was too fixed in its repetitions to resist?” Here, Ross nails the shame that has silenced so many victims, preventing them from even naming the abuse they have endured.
New York plays rôle
1980’s New York itself comes across as a character in a novel where fantasy and reality appear at points to co-exist. “There’s this weird way that New York City, like Venice in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, is this floating, magic, non-realist place, but we experience it as deeply realist,” Ross told Electric Lit in an interview about the novel.
In some ways the ending stands out as one of the only sections that does not entirely satisfy us, since we get little sense of the life awaiting Griffin as he takes off for his future or of how he has changed through his trials and his loss of innocence. Not so with Naomi, who has become such a monster by the end that we don’t feel as sorry as we might when her husband slams a door on her, severing her little finger. The digit lands in the water used by some koi carp, who gobble it up for their tea. Grisly, very grisly. But, also, not entirely unjust.
Playworld Adam Ross £18.55 Alfred Knopf 2025
Helen Fowler Writer 