This World of Dissemblers

Tess Pollok interviews Adam Ross about his novel "Playworld."

By Tess PollokJuly 15, 2025

• Fiction

ADAM ROSS’S NEW NOVEL, Playworld, offers readers a glimpse at the hollowness of promises, from the nuclear family to the presidential administration. With a voice that intones the perils of power, authority, and the almost-thereness of things that are, at best, idyllic facades, Ross traces a perverse tale of the all-American childhood in 1980s New York City. Fourteen-year-old Griffin Hurt lives on the Upper West Side with his dysfunctional family. He enjoys curious success as a child actor in film and television; he also, as the novel chronicles, goes on to have an affair with a 36-year-old married friend of the family.

Like the dreidels, fidget spinners, and other toys from which it somewhat takes its name, Playworld revels in how quickly our trust can spin, and—drawing on Ross’s haunting acuity to capture the consciousness of both children and adults—how quickly it can snap. Ross and I spoke over Zoom in April, a conversation that included the novel’s semi-autobiographical origins, Ross’s aesthetic attraction to 1980s New York, and what he finds compelling about writing these characters.

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TESS POLLOK: Playworld is a novel of power and abuse—but also of fantasy, illusions, and innocence. I’m curious about the semi-autobiographical nature of the work, since you were also a child actor who grew up in 1980s Manhattan.

ADAM ROSS: I like to say that Playworld rhymes with my life. And of course, I’m extremely familiar with the territory that the novel sets out, and what it was like being a New York actor in that era—the brand of repartee, for instance, you’d find on TV and movie sets then. I worked for a summer in 1978 as a teenage actor at Studio 8H, where they shoot Saturday Night Live, and that experience provided invaluable fodder for the novel. I became intimately familiar with the particular boredom that comes from being the only kid on a set of adults, or the waiting around one experiences working for an auteur director, not to mention their top-down control of every aspect of a film. I’m an author who needs that authority over a setting to invent—and certainly that was the case for me with Playworld—but that can come from research too.

So, is it drawing heavily on personal experience? Yes. Would I consider it “autobiographical”? No. I wasn’t as successful as Griffin in television or film, and I never found myself with a major role in a motion picture that threw the same doors open for me that such roles do for him. Part of the reason the novel took me 10 years to write is because there was such a high level of invention involved in coming up with the characters and the plot.

I’m always struck by how often this question comes up. Back when I wrote Mr. Peanut, which is about a computer game designer married to a morbidly obese woman he may or may not have killed, the question I got asked most often on tour was “What does your wife think of this book?” You can write a novel populated with Hitchcockian characters, not to mention a historical figure like Dr. Sam Sheppard, and readers will still think it’s some sort of stealth confession. Or you can write about an experience you’ve lived but have bent into something entirely new—it doesn’t matter. It’s a biographical age, where we overshare and perform our lives for an audience. I’ve come to realize the question is almost a compliment, in that the immediacy of the work suggests something lived.

The era this book takes place, the 1980s, is when my mom grew up. I’m always so fascinated by her stories of what it was like—as a Gen Z woman, it seems so unsupervised and off the rails to me. She used to tell stories about how people’s dogs would just roam the neighborhood … Even if you had a married, suburban nuclear family, it was common practice to just let the dog loose. It’s an image I’ve always carried with me as emblematic of the attitudes of that time.

If you’re asking me does that sound like my own experience, the answer is yes. I think Gen X parents became overprotective and surveilling as a result of what they’d been through and how they’d been raised, which is where the stereotype of the “helicopter parent” comes from. There were a lot of dangers and a lot of close calls for me growing up. It’s hard to overstate the amount of violence my cohort encountered as children, the degree to which New York was at once this hypermodern city yet medieval and filled with dangers. I was mugged countless times as a kid, held up at gun- and knifepoint. I rode my bike everywhere around Manhattan with all my sensors on, and so did my friends, and none of us wore helmets ever. One of the reasons Dungeons & Dragons is such an important motif in the novel is that my real life at the time was filled with random monster encounters, and so is Griffin’s. There was a fantastical romance to New York then, because we were one of the last generations of kids to enjoy the opportunity of it being Neverland.

That’s why it’s a novel about a lost world. One of the reasons that I found Generation X so compelling to write about is that it straddles some of the most massive technological shifts in our lifetime—and also the most massive shifts in our consciousness. We’ve gone from analog to digital to AI. We’ve been forced to adapt to each and, accordingly, say goodbye to certain pillars of our existence as they become obsolete. For example, I had to watch both LPs and moviegoing become forms of niche entertainment.

The way you write about New York City is one of the highlights of the book. There’s such attention to detail, not just in the generic sense of proper place names and period-appropriate cars, but also in the care you take describing the parks, the people—you capture the breath of that era effortlessly.

Well, that’s the world-building element of the novel in operation, which is one of the wonderful capacities a novel has to be uniquely immersive. I was deeply committed to capturing everything I could about Manhattan then, from the susurrating noise issuing from the West Side Highway to the tornadic way the wind used to whip around Columbus Circle. Not to mention the buildings that no longer exist, like the Paramount Theatre at the GW [Gulf and Western] Building … How New York smelled differently in certain seasons, especially because it was dirtier; how all four seasons passed when it seemed the seasons were more distinct—ice floes on the Hudson River, for instance, issuing toward the harbor; and also how race and class created boundaries in New York for Griffin and his friends that made it seem smaller. When I was a boy, Roosevelt Island may as well have been Dragonstone.

It’s a great depiction of the Reagan era, but I felt there were a lot of parallels to life under the Trump administration.

Completely. When a book takes 10 years to write, you have to jettison any intentionality about writing to the “current historical moment.” But when we were approaching publication, it became clearer and clearer that there were uncanny parallels to that moment. Reagan’s actor-awareness, for instance, of the importance of being good on television and managing a Presidential Image, in such a way that it was clear he understood the medium as vital to political expediency—well, Trump shares that talent, except [with him] it’s on steroids. (Albeit as a reality star, lacking Reagan’s film actor polish; Reagan was also doing it at a time when there were more norms with regard to the conduct of political behavior.) There are other weird historical similarities with Trump: [Reagan was] himself a revolutionary of sorts, a change agent with a nostalgic streak, who enjoyed victory over a one-term Democratic president hamstrung by stagflation, a hostage crisis, and poor communication skills. Trump, like Reagan, also inaugurated a massive rightward shift across the country—whose electorate, I’ll add, were suffering a mounting exhaustion with a certain brand of liberalism.

I swear I didn’t plan it this way.

The more intentional political dimension to Playworld is how the novel’s adults stand in for the political sphere. This is manifested in their get-mine-now ethos and rampant greed. They’re analogous to the nascent politics of the time and its [attitude of] “let’s kick the can down the road and worry about paying for it later.” This manifested, among other things, in tax policy—it was Reagan who, with the signing of the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut, passed one of the most massive changes to the tax code. It’s always worth pointing out that when Reagan took office, the national debt was $700 billion, and when he left, it was two trillion. This ethos applies to both parenting and governing in that era. I think when you read the novel, you sense some of these affinities; honestly, when I was writing it, it felt almost spooky.

It felt appropriate, given the nature of your commentary on fantasy and the manipulation of images, that the primary relationship in the novel is between an adult and a child—between Naomi and Griffin.

I was really interested in the fact that, back then, there wasn’t a language for things like boundaries or predation. Behavior like that was completely normalized, and the lack of boundaries was commonplace—an everyday thing. And here, framing the novel, is a relationship between an attention-starved kid and a love-starved woman. She can present herself to him maternally—she can play that role—but she has other intentions.

It’s also one of the novel’s ironies that, at critical moments, Naomi uses her role as a mother and a guardian to protect him. Still, the dynamic between them is central to Griffin’s development because she helps get him to articulate things he wants in life. She does actually help him come to know himself. And that’s also true of his relationships with many of the adults who fail him in the novel, because, despite the [gaps in the] ways they present themselves [and] how they behave when they’re unwittingly being observed, Griffin still learns from them. In this world of dissemblers, Griffin has to arrive at his own truths.

I wonder sometimes if the type of language that governs adult-child relationships now is too clinical, or too encouraging of a sterile relationship between people who should be close. I also feel that it can sometimes make people paranoid.

I wouldn’t disagree. I also wouldn’t want my daughters to suffer what Griffin does to cultivate that holy grail of characteristics parents desire for their children these days, which is grit. Playworld is a cautionary tale that also wants the reader to feel our current moment’s correction.

Fantasy, which can be so comforting and seductive and normal, plays a huge role in the novel. One of the things that I think works in Playworld is how nonreactive people are to abuse-of-power situations. I liked the way you emulated that aura of naturalness that emanates from everything when you have an unshattered and unpierced worldview. It felt especially appropriate given the Dungeons & Dragons escapism motif, which is one of my favorite parts of the book.

That cuts right to the center of how the book had to operate on a technical level. For the illusion of Playworld to have integrity, yes, Griffin had to be nonreactive, because the lack of language for what is happening to him enables its normalization. He bends but doesn’t break. Perhaps the starkest irony that speaks to this in the novel is that Griffin’s abusive wrestling coach is the one who constantly tells him that, to succeed at wrestling, “you’ve got to move.” Griffin keeps powering through these experiences for which he lacks language. And when he plays Dungeons & Dragons, he gets to create a world where he has what he lacks in his own life—which is both agency and control.

Another thing: For Griffin and his friends, D&D is something to be played, but what fascinates me about observing kids now is that they’re often just watching Twitch streams of someone else gaming instead of getting into the mix themselves. Kids watch other kids play Minecraft and Fortnite. Crazy. I sometimes wonder if this generation is one, two, three steps removed from experiential learning—which points to the large degree of isolation and loneliness this generation feels.

Speaking of ways of living that no longer exist, I’m very interested in the book’s attitude toward the white American nuclear family.

I think one of the saving graces of Gen X is that the lack of a pathologizing ethos made people more forgiving. I’ve read recently that more and more young people are divorcing their parents. There’s a bizarre hubris to that. It’s not that our parents or their generation are necessarily less toxic and destructive; still, there’s humility to understanding that everybody is just trying to do the best that they can. Maybe you could tell this to my daughters.

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Adam Ross is the author of Mr. Peanut (2010), 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.

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Featured image: Photo of Adam Ross by Emily Dorio.