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Alison Stewart: You're listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the novel Playworld, it's 1980s in New York City. At just 14 years old, Griffin is a successful child actor, starring on a well liked TV show. He has two loving parents and a devoted younger brother. Between acting school and wrestling, Griffin can't seem to keep up or find anyone who will listen to him, until he meets Naomi, a friend of his parents, and the wife of a very wealthy man. Even though Naomi is 36, she becomes obsessed with Griffin, and Griffin likes that she's a good listener. Soon they are having weekly meetups in Naomi's car. Griffin also finds himself drawing the attention of his wrestling coach, a predatory man uses private practice time as an excuse to abuse his athletes. As Griffin navigates around New York City and tries to navigate his adolescence, he learns all sorts of mixed messages about what it means to be an adult. It's also a great novel about our city in the 1980s. The New York Times writes, "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 the lurid Reagan technicolor." Tonight at 6:30, Adam Ross will be speaking at McNally Jackson Seaport. First, he joins me in studio to discuss Playworld. Nice to meet you.

Adam Ross: It's nice to meet you too.

Alison: Many details in the story, they come from your own life. How autobiographical to make this?

Adam: I like to say that Playworld rhymes with my life. I was a child actor, and my parents were in the arts in Manhattan. My mother was a former professional dancer. My father was on musical Broadway and was a voiceover guy. These were settings, these were experiences that I knew well. When you're writing fiction, and I would make a distinction between fiction and autofiction in the sense that you're not doing something that is so porous or so transparently your life.

You have to bend things. You have to change things. That was one of the reasons why I labored over the novel so long. Short answer really is, it's the differences in fiction that make it fiction. I was in no way, shape or form as successful as Griffin is. I was in no way, shape or form faced with the choices Griffin was.

Alison: You were a 14 year old New York.

Adam: I was 14 year old New York at a very unique time in Manhattan. I was a New York child actor starting around the age of 11. You were adjacent to certain kinds of greatness, and adjacent to a very particular species of creative in Manhattan.

Alison: This is a coming-of-age story.

Adam: Yes.

Alison: Do you have a favorite coming-of-age story?

Adam: Oh, wow. That's such a great question. I'll say this, the coming-of-age story, if it is even really considered a buildings Roman in the strict sense of the word, and a book that was on my mind a lot, not in terms of structure, but in terms of, shall we say, energy and just a torrential amount of specificity and content, was The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, who just in his third book, just poured all of his talent into rendering Chicago both as a boy and later in his life.

That's part of what I set out to do in Playworld. I was just like, "I'm going to fully commit to creating the sight sounds, the slant of light, the griminess," as I thought it was pointed out so beautifully in the Jacobs review, but an enduring magic of Manhattan that keeps getting reiterated generation to generation.

Alison: There are parts of this book that have made me laugh, I have to admit. It's in two parts. It's in a Carter administration and the Reagan. I'm up to Carter. Don't tell me anymore. Well, you can tell me a little bit more. Why did you want to define the book between the Carter administration and the Reagan administration?

Adam: Oh, it's such a good question. First of all, because it was such a consequential moment in American history, which on a spooky action level, with Carter just recently dying and us having an entertainer president coming in, which of course I didn't plan for, has these odd echoes. Here's what I came to realize as I was writing a book about that distinction. It's like, what was the Reagan era's main message.

Alison: More and more and more.

Adam: It was more and more and more, but it was deregulated small government. We move from the Carter administration with all of its malaise, into the get mine now era of the Go-Go 80s, the Reagan administration, where in the Reagan administration, just like we were parented at that time, we Gen-Xers, we were deregulated. We had deregulated parenting.

In some ways, the parents in the novel stand in for the political sphere, and manifest the voracious appetites that we just saw coming to fruition in the Reagan era. I will say this one other thing, which is also that, there's a way in which some of the major changes in tax policy began in 1981 when Reagan signs the Kemp Roth Act, which seems wonky, maybe to listeners, but it was one of the biggest tax cuts in history.

It's the beginning of America cashing a check on the future, and that they're not sure how they're going to pay back. In some ways, that's what the adults do in Griffin's world. Deregulated parenting, which is, of course, like the things that Griffin does, that I did in my childhood in America, I think are unimaginable to parents allowing their kids to do now.

Alison: I'm wondering about the age of 14. Griffin's 14. I was 14 in 1980. I remember. I grew up in Jersey. You wish you could be a kid in New York when you were 14. What is it about being 14 in New York at this time?

Adam: That's such a great question, because it is usually for most kids, such a pivotal year in terms of moving from simply taking the world as it is, to beginning to question it, which, if you look at the arc of Griffin's, I won't spoil it for you, Alison.

Alison: Thank you.

Adam: If you look at the arc of Griffin's, of his--

Alison: You can spoil it. It's okay. My job.

Adam: He begins to learn how to say, no, to certain. Part of that is him beginning to have a critical posture toward these things that are happening to him that are terrible. He begins to learn how to protect himself, which is why-- What's his name? His name is Griffin. What's a Griffin? A griffin in mythology is a monster that protects valuable things. Part of what Griffin is learning to do in his monstrous transformation is learning how to protect himself.

To me, that's what 14 is, because you see strange things, but you start to come up with a language for both your own experience, and a language for your own boundaries and sense of self. You're just beginning. That's how we leave Griffin in the novel. He's just beginning to articulate who he is and what he values.

Alison: We are talking about the novel Playworld by Adam Ross. I'm going to ask you to read the prologue for us.

Adam: Sure.

Alison: I've got my book too.

Adam: Prologue. In the fall of 1980, when I was 14, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shaw fell in love with me. She was 36, 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 have 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, 300 SD, 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 seats 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 11:00 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. For the most part, the likeness was uncanny, but at certain angles you could tell the cuticle's line was too smooth, the nails 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.

Alison: That's Adam Ross, reading from his new novel, Playworld. Griffin makes a move on Naomi at a family party. Why is he so bold in that moment?

Adam: Because he has no idea what he's doing. Because I think Griffin's great talent is for cosplaying adulthood. Griffin's great talent is also cosplaying childhood. He can toggle between those roles. Because he doesn't know what deep waters he's in, he doesn't realize that in the heat of Naomi's initial attention at this party, because he's an attention-starved kid, as I think, again, a lot of Gen X kids were in weird ways. They weren't starved for friendship, but they were starved, I think, for a certain parental attention. He performs himself and he knows that maybe this is what he should be doing, but he almost like forgets he's 14.

Alison: Is that because he's an actor? Is that why he's performing so much?

Adam: Yes. I think he's had success as an actor by-- What is a child actor? A child actor, generally speaking, does not have any sense of technique. A child actor, generally speaking, is comfortable being him or herself in front of the camera.

Alison: And having some charisma, too.

Adam: Yes, and having some charisma, which Griffin does have. Again, there's not any self consciousness. He unwittingly steps into her line of sight in ways that he's not prepared for. Going back to your earlier question, Alison, he's also becoming a young man. He's described in the novel. He's a handsome young man. Being on the cusp of adulthood, I think he signals to her a certain kind of childhood that maybe she feels like she's lost cause she's in an unhappy marriage. Boom, unwittingly, the attraction is established. They give each other something. She gives him attention, which he desperately needs. He gives her back a innocence and a passion. As gray an area as it is, he does.

Alison: Naomi really likes to listen to him.

Adam: She does.

Alison: What does she get out of listening to him?

Adam: I think that what she gets out of it is openness. Actually, I think at some point in the novel, as I recall in part 1, she says to him I really appreciate what an open book you are. I think for Naomi, in -- Look, there's no worse thing to suffer, than loneliness in marriage. To me, it's one of the most acute forms of loneliness. That's what I think she's suffering.

She too, is so available to that kind of intimacy of a young boy man just sharing everything. That's how they start to get into trouble. That's how she lures him in some ways into forms of trouble. Of course, it's predation. I would never want the gray facts, the ambiguous facts of their relationship to muddle the fact that what she's doing is she's taking advantage of a situation. She's the adult. She recognizes that he's vulnerable, but she develops feelings for him.

Alison: We learn early on in the book that when Griffin was little, he accidentally caused an apartment in a fire that destroyed all the family's belongings. He killed the cat.

Adam: Yes, the cat. Spoiler.

Alison: Spoiler. How do you think this affects Griffin in his teenage years?

Adam: I do just want to say there were certain people who read early versions of the novel, and they were like, "You killed the cat. How dare you kill the cat." You definitely found who are cat lovers and who are dog lovers. How do I think it affects Griffin? What it does is Griffin has two things. He has an enormous sense of guilt and responsibility, but also the most important thing is that the way in which his father in particular handles Griffin understanding what he did in an age where maybe it's really too early for Griffin to understand what he did or the way in which his father foists responsibility for that event on him.

What it does, and this is something that happens in a lot of trauma, is it peels Griffin away from himself. He disengages as a, I think, defensive reaction from his own feelings. That detachment, that feeling of detachment from his own feelings is, again one of the novel's, I think, most important arcs, which is, is he going to reconnect with himself? Because his acting in real life, when he plays himself in real life, that is a defensive strategy, that is chameleonic, that is in all the oceanic imagery that's in Playworld, that's he's like a cuttlefish. He just can disappear into background.

That's what his family of origin has taught him because of something he wasn't responsible for. If you leave out candles, lit candles, your kid is going to play pretend and maybe do something unwittingly bad. He learns how to feel his feelings without fear of retribution.

Alison: There's this amazing scene where they all go to the same therapist, in half hour slots. What does it say about the theme that they go to the same therapist?

Adam: Oh my God. It's so funny. Last night I was talking with a friend who both her parents, she's my age, and both her parents were therapists. It was the exact same thing when I was that age where our therapists were constantly socializing with their analysands, and they were at parties. Again, what does it do? I think that one of the things I'm trying to capture, it's this double edged sword thing. It goes like this, Alison, back in the day, we didn't have this language of boundaries. We didn't know what to call some of these things. Yet at the same time--

Alison: It wasn't right. What are you trying.

Adam: No, no, it's not that it wasn't right. It's just that on the continuum of the language we have for development, we didn't think that that was like something you should or shouldn't be doing. Again, what does that do? That makes Griffin, and especially his brother Oren, who doesn't-

Alison: Poor guy.

Adam: -trust anybody. It's a miseducation in what you reveal, what you don't reveal. That's another way in which the boys, because of this crazy world, where they know that they're "being analyzed" by their parents best friend, it makes them hide things.

Alison: Where did the name Oren come from?

Adam: Oh, gosh. The name Oren, I just love the music of it. When Griffin, later in the book, falls in love with a girl his own age, her name is Amanda. The name Amanda means something worthy of being protected. There's real symbolism there. There are certain characters like Almoredi, Tanner Potts, they're just names that have a certain musical quality that you, as an author, because you're going to live with them for years, you just like to say, and Oren, I don't know, it's both a strong name, and it's a musically beautiful name.

Oren's like that. Oren is this kid who has to be hard. You learn throughout the novel that his hardness was once soft like his name is. I'm making it sound like I really thought it through. I just love the name.

Alison: I want to get one more thing in before we run out of time, is his wrestling coach. He's really involved with wrestling. There's a lot that goes on there. You write about wrestling in such vivid detail. Did you wrestle?

Adam: I'm going to brag on myself. I was a New York state champion wrestler in high school. I wrestled for six years in high school, and now I do jiu jitsu. I've been doing jiu jitsu for eight years.

Alison: What does wrestling mean to Griffin?

Adam: Wrestling is the place where there is no acting, there is no dissembling. Wrestling is the gladiatorial pit where nobody can pretend to be anything other than they are. Griffin relishes this space where he's pitted against somebody his weight.

Alison: Sometimes his weight.

Adam: Sometimes his weight, if he makes weight, but it's pitted against somebody where who he is is revealed to him in the contest. He is passionate about this. If you think about his original trauma, it's the place where he can possibly become adept enough to overpower these monsters that are all around him. He does have an abusive wrestling coach, and that's another adult character, in a book that also touches on D and D.

Alison: It is an entire chapter called Dungeons and Dragons.

Adam: That's right. He's got to fight monsters. When you wrestle, you fight monsters, but sometimes in life you fight other kinds of monsters.

Alison: Adam Ross, we've been talking to him about his new novel, Playworld. He will be speaking tonight at 6:30 at McNally Jackson at the Seaport location. It's really nice to have you back in studio. You're in Tennessee now.

Adam: I've been in Nashville, Tennessee, since 1995. I'm the editor-in-chief of the Suwannee Review Literary magazine, which is the oldest literary magazine in America.

Alison: [unintelligible 00:23:31] Thanks for coming by.

Adam: Thanks, Alison.

Alison: Lakecia Benjamin is New York born, and raised alto saxophonist who is nominated for two Grammys this year, coming up. She'll join us in studio with her band for a special live performance that comes up next right after the news headlines.

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