Childhood Is Over

On Adam Ross' 'Playworld'

Remedios Varo, Encuentro, 1959, Oil on canvas

It happens suddenly, sometimes before we even recognize it, and we don’t get any say. We might be slow to acknowledge it; we might even resist it. But we can’t avoid it, or wish it away. Eventually we learn to process it, accept it, move forward. What other choice do we have? Adulthood comes for all of us, sooner or later. We might mourn what we’ve lost. Or we might be relieved that childhood — with its attendant confusion, anxiety, and lack of freedom — is over. Either way, there’s no turning back.

Griffin Hurt, the young protagonist of Playworld, an outstanding new novel by Adam Ross, is a student of adulthood. Precocious and observant, he absorbs its manners and mores, familiarizes himself with its customs and concealments. The world of adults is disorienting and opaque, but he learns how to ingratiate himself with them, approximate their behavior. Like a kid trying on his father’s clothing, he might be able to convince you that the suit jacket is his — but look closer, and you’ll see the tailoring is off.

Adulthood, of course, is more than just looking the part. But performance — the disguises we wear to avoid revealing too much of ourselves — is central to Griffin’s conception of it. His world is populated with children playacting as adults, and adults who exploit their desire to be treated as more than children. His parents, Shel and Lily, make their modest living in the performing arts — Shel as an actor and voice coach, Lily as a dance teacher — and Griffin goes into the industry out of financial necessity. He gets a recurring role as Peter Proton in the television show The Nuclear Family, and his paychecks help fund his tuition at the fictional Boyd Prep, close to where he lives on the Upper West Side. As the deep malaise of the Carter administration gives way to the gaudy excess of the Reagan era, Griffin negotiates adolescence as a series of performances, cycling through the parts he is expected to play.

His relationship with Naomi Shah, a family friend 22 years his senior, offers him both an escape into a more authentic self and his most compelling role. Naomi appears intermittently in the book, often in a Mercedes sedan where she and Griffin form a tender, if disturbing, bond, but her presence is felt throughout. Griffin is drawn to her in part because she offers him something that acting alone cannot: “The truth was I felt no physical desire for her — not then, at least. What I did want, what I desperately needed, was her audience,” he says.

This kind of eloquence can only be summoned in hindsight. The gulf between what children perceive and what they can articulate forms the tragic core of Playworld. Griffin, reflecting on his traumatic childhood, comes of age in an era that lacks the cultural language to identify the behavior of abusers: how they insinuate themselves into our lives, how they cultivate our trust, how they slowly cut us off from the people around us, and from ourselves. When his high school wrestling coach, known by his surname Kepplemen, sexually abuses him, Griffin discovers that language, however limited, offers a way back to the world:

“Even later, when I joined Cliff and Tanner in the front hall and they asked, ‘Where were you?’ I need only reply ‘Kepplemen…’ Which was the trick, or the spell. Which was the only power we had. Because he was the only word for it we knew.”

One of the grim ironies of our contemporary discourse is that even as our vocabulary for predation has grown infinitely richer and more nuanced, our popular conception of it remains abstracted, one-dimensional. We want — need — our predators to conform to certain expectations of foreignness, to prove their fundamental difference from us. In less capable hands, the portrayal of characters like Naomi and Kepplemen could have fallen into that trap, their encounters with Griffin rendered with the luridness of an episode of Dateline. The novel wisely avoids this kind of caricature. The people who victimize Griffin may be monsters, but Ross’ nuanced characterizations make them into something far more disquieting: human. We live among Naomis and Kepplemens, the novel seems to argue, and while we might find their urges morally repulsive, the knot of insecurity, loneliness, unhappiness, and need for control that lurks underneath their predations is more familiar than any of us want to acknowledge. It might even elicit some muted, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God sympathy.

The themes Playworld mines, its treatment of the myriad ways adults take advantage of children, will inevitably invite comparisons to Lolita. Like Playworld, Nabokov’s novel probes the relationship between eroticism and love, the libidinal pull of the taboo. The critic Lionel Trilling argues that the real shock value of Lolita derives not from its prurient descriptions of an underage girl, but its subtle implication of the reader, the way “we have been seduced into conniving in the violation [and] permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.” If we are disgusted by Humbert Humbert, Trilling suggests, it is because we have condoned his feverish pursuit of the forbidden.

Ross, unlike Nabokov, is not out to indict us. Griffin is wounded too, and Naomi and Kepplemen offer him something that is otherwise absent in his life: attention, structure, the feeling of being seen. Forced to choose between the oblivious neglect of his parents and the flattering attention of his abusers, he’ll take the latter, at least initially. Only by understanding that he’s been presented with a false binary — in other words, by growing up — can he break with the flawed models of adulthood around him, and forge his own.

Despite its somewhat daunting length, Playworld’s story is brisk and engaging. Scenes of standard adolescent hijinks, like a prank call or a party at someone’s parents’ house, are imbued with suspense, sometimes profundity. Ross’ prose, lyrical and unfussy, can conjure vivid sensory impressions, as when he compares the smell of a burned-out apartment to “the carcass of a drowned dragon,” or describes the windows of a commuter train as “green as pond scum.” The novel does suffer from an occasionally grating tendency to overstress certain motifs. It’s true, all the world’s a stage, and yes, that monologue is excerpted here. The reader can be trusted to do that mental work on their own.

Still, these are minor quibbles. With Playworld, Ross adeptly captures the texture of adolescence, the haphazard grasping toward a self that everyone undergoes on that circuitous journey to adulthood. If his experiences are unique, and uniquely traumatic, his anxieties are universal. The bad news for him, and for us, is that those never really end. Will I turn out okay? wonders the adolescent. Why was I in such a hurry? asks the adult.

Jonah Allon is a writer and political communications professional living in Brooklyn.