A trip back to the ’80s, with the feel of a more innocent age, whatever the reality
Book Review Playworld By Adam RossKnopf: 528 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Adam Ross’ extraordinary second novel, “Playworld,” is a beguiling ode to a lost era, one that predates helicopter parenting, cellphones and perhaps even cynicism. It is set primarily over the course of one year during which prep school freshman Griffin Hurt undergoes a sentimental education like no other. Among the initiating events: “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen,” Griffin recalls, “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.” (Knopf) Griffin narrates the novel as an adult recalling this seminal period in his coming of age with a sort of bemused irony, so that even shocking events — the aforementioned affair, muggings, a fire that burns down their apartment and kills their cat, even repeated sexual abuse at the hands of Griffin’s wrestling coach, Mr. Kepplemen — are cast in a gauzy haze. We really don’t
