Playworld: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Ross, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345807006 ISBN 13: 9780345807007

Publisher: Vintage, 2026

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE • 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

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TOWN & COUNTRY, AND PEOPLE • GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • MULANEY READS BOOK CLUB PICK

"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

“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—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.

About this title

About the Author

ADAM ROSS is the author of Mr. Peanut, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He has been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review. Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

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.

Two decades later, when I finally told my mother—we were on Long Island, taking a walk on the beach—she stopped, stunned, and said, “But she was such an ugly woman.” The remark wasn’t as petty as it sounds. If I was aware of it then, it neither repulsed me nor affected my feelings for Naomi. It was just a thing I took for granted, like the color of her hair.

Wiry and ashen, it had the shading but not the shimmer of pigeon feathers. Naomi kept it long, so that it fell past her shoulders. I knew it by touch, for my face was often buried in it. Only later did I wonder if she considered herself unattractive, because she always wore sunglasses, as if to hide her face, large gold frames with blue-tinted prescription lenses. When we were driving together, which was often that year, she’d allow these to slide down her nose and then look at me over their bridge. She might’ve considered this pose winning, but it was more likely to see me better. Her mouth often hung slightly open. Her lower teeth were uneven, and her tongue, which pressed against them, always tasted of coffee.

Naomi’s car was a silver Mercedes sedan—300sd along with turbo diesel nickel-plated on the back—that made a deep hum when she drove. The interior, enormous in my mind’s eye, was tricked out with glossy wood paneling and white leather, back seat so wide and legroom so ample they made the driver appear to be far away. It was in this car that Naomi and I talked most often. We’d park, and then she’d lean across the armrest to press her cheek to mine, and I’d sometimes allow her to kiss me. Other times we’d move to the back. Lying there with Naomi, her nose nuzzled to my neck, I’d stare at the ceiling’s dotted fabric until the pattern seemed to detach and drift like a starred sky. This car was her prized possession, and like many commuters, she had turned the machine into an extension of her body. Her left thumb lightly hooked the wheel at eight o’clock when traffic was moving, her fingertips sliding to eleven when it was slow. She preferred to sit slightly reclined, her free hand spread on her inner thigh, though after she lost her pinky the following summer, and even after being fitted with a prosthesis, she kept it tucked away.

“I was worried you’d think it was disgusting,” she said, the digit hidden between the seat and her hip. She’d bought herself a diamond ring to hide the seam, and for the most part the likeness was uncanny, but at certain angles you could tell—the cuticle’s line was too smooth, the nail’s pale crescent too creamy to match the others. Like my father’s fake teeth, which he occasionally left lying around our apartment, I was fascinated by it, though my curiosity wasn’t morbid. I was a child actor, you see, a student of all forms of dissembling, and had long ago found my greatest subject to be adults.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345807006
• ISBN 13: 9780345807007
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528