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• Ladies and Gentlemen Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2011
• Playworld Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2025

1. Playworld : a novel LCCN 2023048924 Type of material Book Personal name Ross, Adam, 1967- author. Main title Playworld : a novel / Adam Ross. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2025. ©2025 Projected pub date 2501 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780385351300 (eBook) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Ladies and gentlemen LCCN 2011006960 Type of material Book Personal name Ross, Adam, 1967- author. Main title Ladies and gentlemen / Adam Ross. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Description 243 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780307270719 Shelf Location FLS2013 005123 CALL NUMBER PS3618.O84515 L33 2011 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1)

• The Rumpus - https://therumpus.net/2011/08/19/the-rumpus-interview-with-adam-ross/

  The Rumpus Interview with Adam Ross
  Marco KayeAugust 19, 2011
  Traces of Adam Ross’s life appear in the pages of his latest book of stories, Ladies and Gentlemen. There’s the teenage boy attending Trinity School in Manhattan, a journalist traveling to interview a famous actress, and an English professor who is a vessel for other people’s stories. “I became a writer,” reflects one narrator. “This means I’m free to embellish, to treat memory as fact or shape it to suit whatever I’m working on. My primary responsibility, I suppose, is to set you dreaming.”

  The stories in Ladies and Gentlemen are no exception. The book has received praise from reviewers and readers alike, a continuation of the success garnered by Adam’s dark, impressive debut, Mr. Peanut. Adam and I corresponded over email, discussing the dualistic nature of storytelling, the influence of teachers, and cruelty in its many forms.

  ***

  The Rumpus: Why do you call Ladies and Gentlemen a “companion book” to Mr. Peanut?

  Adam Ross: Because I wrote these stories during enforced breaks from the novel—idle, confusing periods, when I struggled to connect Mr. Peanut’s dots—just to get a taste of The End of something. Unfortunately, my writing process is often one of linking alpha and omega, so completion is an entirely different matter. I begin a story with a clear idea of the ending: it’s everything in between that I struggle with, that supplies the creative tension. So from 1995-2007, I had numerous incomplete narratives littering my desk that I finally finished, and presto: I arrived at the publishing world’s gates with two books instead of one. This is also a long way of saying that Mr. Peanut and Ladies and Gentlemen are both born of the same creative period.

  Consequently, they share similar themes. True, Ladies and Gentlemen focuses on the revelatory nature of cruelty, but in these stories I’m exploring the tension between progress and cyclicality in relationships as well as our tendency to lose sight of those closest to us, and how we often come to know our best selves in retrospect. We cobble together our higher moral selves after we sin. They may not be as structurally complex as Mr. Peanut, but in my opinion, telling a riveting story with complex implications is no easy task, so I’m really proud of the ones in this book.

  Rumpus: Characters burden each other with stories in Ladies and Gentlemen. Yet the title implies stories are entertainment, calling to mind an emcee in front of a red curtain. Can stories be both?

  Ross: Stories we tell shield us from each other—they’re a form of defense—and expose us, revealing our failures and secrets, the roles we play, and so here you have the idea of showmanship and acting in the collection. Stories are also a form of seduction and enchantment, and if listeners strike the lure and suspend disbelief the storyteller can instruct them, provide existential comfort, or send them over a cliff if he or she chooses. Consider the great ruse of “Futures”: out of desperate necessity, Applelow buys the bill of goods his potential employers are selling only to find he’s trapped in a devious, humiliating narrative. In that same narrative, Marnie begrudgingly invites Applelow into the story of her struggling son. Jacob, the protagonist of “Middleman,” is burdened by the lack of a monolithic narrative organizing his life. The young narrator in “The Suicide Room” is lying to one-up his rival for a woman’s affections while bullshitting about the most serious matters. In the collection’s title story, the potentially saving power of the tales Sarah’s seatmate tells her on their short flight between Nashville and St. Louis give her pause before she makes what may be a life-altering decision. His story helps her gain equilibrium when she’s reeling.

  So the answer is yes, stories can be both burdensome and entertaining, but there’s this vital exchange between teller and listener, an offering and an atonement, because each perhaps comes to understand something new and takes that knowledge with him and become a better person or an agent of evil afterward. We have the opportunity to become ladies and gentlemen thanks to narrative constructs, to a storyteller who lies like truth. I guess one of the questions I’m most interested in is the following: What do we do after we’ve arrived at The End?

  Rumpus: “Futures” includes a Hitchcock reference, continuing an obsession from Mr. Peanut. The main character is struck by Hitchcock’s gift for the embedded hint. “Look at all the clues you missed, the director seemed to be saying.” On reading this, I felt like you were saying that to me as a reader. Since some of these stories have surprise endings, do you go back and add clues? Or do you discover them as you go, and this helps guide you through the story?

  Ross: I do retro-fit and embed clues, I discover others, and yet you, the reader, still didn’t figure out the ending of “Futures,” I’ll bet. Or, like the MacGuffin in Hitchcock, the answer to the reveal, the mystery, has, I hope, completely diminished in importance over the course of the narrative. Plenty of people tell me they saw the end coming in, say, “When in Rome,” to which I say, so what? Caleb didn’t, and the reasons for his oversight are what I want the reader to examine. Or put another way: If the reader gets ahead of the end in someone else’s story, can he or she anticipate possible outcomes in his or her own? This directly correlates to Mr. Peanut. “We tell stories about other people’s marriages,” Detective Hastroll reflects, “but can we tell the stories of our own?”

  It goes back to what I was saying in the previous question. We get caught up in a story, and we’re so enchanted we miss or ignore the warnings, the hints about danger. We hurry past harbingers in our titillated state. This, to me, has all sorts of social and political implications, by the way. In Applelow’s case in “Futures,” what’s important is that the horrors that befall him don’t neutralize his capacity for heroic goodness.

  But look, here’s the deal with Hitchcock: He knew the viewer wanted to voyeuristically participate in evil, in turpitude, and then get off scot free when the lights came back on. In Ladies and Gentlemen, I wanted to write stories haunting enough that they held a mirror up to the reader. What does the reader do with the moral implications afterwards? The answer to that question indicates whether or not we really progress, whether consciousness delivers us from evil, or whether we willfully forget instruction or moments of self-examination and instead obey our immediate appetites.

  Rumpus: The stories are split almost equally between first and third person, though (correct me if I’m wrong), I feel like your natural impulse is the third. Are you of the Cheever philosophy that a writer needs to “earn” the right to use first person?

  Ross: I think that the reader reading a first-person narrative has to be very keen to dramatic irony, to what the speaker reveals about him or herself during the telling. Caleb, for instance, in “When in Rome,” is not the good guy he thinks he is, and that comes through subtly over the course of the story. Morally speaking, he and his brother are both sliding down a slippery slope. Caleb’s just a little higher up the ramp but sins by holding his brother’s circumstances against him. He’s still playing the game of fraternal one-upsmanship. “The Suicide Room’s” narrator is a story-thief and a nearly empty vessel, a cipher—he’s trying to put together a sense of self—right in front of you. And with regard to Cheever, one of his greatest, most affecting stories, “Goodbye, My Brother,” is written in first person. That’s not an earned point of view, in my opinion, but a necessary one, since the elder brother in that story is, among other things, an alcoholic in a state of denial and attacks his brother because the latter threatens the family’s fog of unknowing.

  As for natural impulse, well, I don’t know. True, there’s expansiveness in the third person that first doesn’t always allow, unless, of course, you write, say, Augie March, Lolita, or Moby Dick. I make that choice from the gut. It just feels right or it doesn’t.

  Rumpus: Before you begin writing, what makes a scene vivid to you? Is it a specific detail? Or the situation? What makes you jump to the keyboard?

  Ross: I hear something I can’t shake. It’s like getting your imagination branded. I can’t describe it any better. I file it away and know I’ll probably use it down the road. It happens all the time and I don’t necessarily jump to the keyboard. I just let it sink in sometimes.

  Rumpus: Reading your work, I pick up handy tips. Now that I’ve read “Middlemen,” I’ll never make the mistake of rinsing my razor blade with hot water. Mr. Peanut included advice on writing a novel. Do you think stories should provide instructions on living?

  Ross: Sure, but with a healthy dose of irony. I’m no guru, and my characters who pose as such are revealed to have less admirable sides. You mentioned Mr. Duckworth in “Middleman” and although he has an appealing sense of honor, he’s pretty hard on his son, Kyle, partly because he wants his undivided attention, which he finds instead in his son’s best friend Jacob. Not a great quality in a father, even if he’s got useful information to impart.

  Rumpus: Many of these stories contain elements of your life. How do you keep an objective distance with your characters and situations? Or is the point to be nonobjective and posit alternative outcomes to your own life?

  Ross: Both. I bend autobiography, misshape it, to the point where it’s unrecognizable or strange enough to invent with it. Memory lies first of all, but there’s this point beyond memory where you’re just making shit up, and that’s fiction. Autobiography is merely a jumping off point.

  But on an autobiographical note, in “The Rest of It,” the story about professor Roddy Thane and his precarious friendship with the college’s raconteur maintenance man, I was imagining how horrible it would be if my wife and I divorced and then she went on to remarry and have a life without me. In other words, I was taking dictation from my own nightmare. In that story, the phone conversation Thane has with his wife Ashley is the part of the story I’m proudest of because I was pleased with how emotionally wrenching it was—again, to me, but hopefully to the reader as well.

  Rumpus: On Twitter, you wrote of a terrifying incident. “Held up at double gun point in East Nashville tonight, in a restaurant. What do they say? Stories happen to people who can tell them.” Can you elaborate on that?

  Ross: Last winter, some friends from New York came to Nashville to see a Predators game. They invited us to dinner afterward at a joint called the Holland House. East Nashville, no punches pulled, isn’t the safest part of the city, and upon parking my wife joked, “Let’s hurry inside before we get shot.”

  Well, we’re sitting in a booth near the entrance and halfway through our meal two thugs enter, one carrying a sawed-off shotgun, the other a .38, and the former points his weapon in my wife’s face. They make everyone lie on the floor and calmly rob the place. Bizarrely, they walked over to my table and left our friend’s wallet there, but stole my BlackBerry instead, which was a bummer for me, because I had some great pictures of my kids on it. I guess I should’ve asked them for the Sim card. Anyway, they split thirty seconds before the police arrived, which was a blessing, obviously, because no one was hurt but certainly could’ve been in a standoff or ensuing shootout.

  It’s the third time I’ve been held up at gunpoint. I used experiences from the second time—a long and very harrowing story—to describe the mugging that occurs in “When in Rome.” Imagination is great, it really is, but when Caleb has a pistol pointed at his face and says, “I could see the torpedo-glint of the bullet tips in the cylinder. They looked like snakes peering out of a pit,” well, I can’t describe it better and I also redeemed a violent episode by using it somewhere. The difference between the holdup I just described in detail and the experience I used in “When in Rome” is that I retrofit the latter into a narrative, into an aesthetic framework. It sounds highfalutin but all I’m saying is that storytellers take senseless acts and try to give them meaning. There, I said something only three million people have said before me.

  Rumpus: Your teachers include William Gass and Stanley Elkin, yet experimental or satiric impulses are not at the surface in your stories. Why?

  Ross: Both teachers certainly had an influence. Hearing Gass talk about sustaining pressure in sentences has had a lasting effect on my writing, though I’m very wary of writing that calls attention to itself as Good Writing. The line between tour de force and showboating is a fine one. Still, Gass’s teaching made me read all my work aloud, and when I do write long, complex sentences, I apply the Roberto Bolano Rule: if I lose the thread of meaning, I restructure. Or my editor, Gary Fisketjon, crosses the shit out and writes, “Ugh” in the margin.

  As for Elkin, well, “Futures” threatens to veer off into the surreal but no, I’m not quite as confident in that mode of, what, satiric surrealism? Still, you can learn a whole lot about being funny from stories like Elkin’s “The Guest,” “A Poetics for Bullies,” some of the set pieces in “The Dick Gibson Show,” or his novellas, “The Franchiser” or “The Making of Ashenden,” which are, along with “The Living End,” maybe the funniest narratives I’ve ever read. Elkin believed all comedy derived from powerlessness and I often use that strategy in my stories. In my opinion, it’s what makes some of the interview scenes in “Futures” chuckle-worthy.

  Rumpus: You wrote Mr. Peanut and the stories in Ladies and Gentlemen over the course of fifteen years. How did your writing change in that time?

  Ross: No one will know until I’m dead, but suffice it to say, I grew a lot as a writer. There were thirteen stories in Ladies and Gentlemen’s original manuscript. Seven made the cut. So as a writer, I’m batting a little over five hundred. Still won’t earn me a single year of Derek Jeter’s salary, but writers shouldn’t go into the literary fiction business to make bling.

• The Orange County Register - https://www.ocregister.com/2025/01/16/how-adam-ross-rewrites-his-own-experiences-to-create-reality-in-playworld/

  How Adam Ross rewrites his own experiences to create reality in ‘Playworld’
  The novel's narrator recounts a coming-of-age tale set largely in Manhattan in 1980-81.
  Adam Ross is the author of the novel, “Playworld.” (Photo credit: Emily Dorio / Courtesy of Knopf)
  Adam Ross is the author of the novel, “Playworld.” (Photo credit: Emily Dorio / Courtesy of Knopf)
  Author
  By Stuart Miller | smiller@journalist.com
  PUBLISHED: January 16, 2025 at 10:00 AM PST

  When Griffin Hurt was in ninth grade, he was a child actor, starring in a hit TV series and winning a crucial role in an esteemed director’s latest film. But that wasn’t all. Griffin fell into an affair with a 36-year-old mother of two and he was also being sexually abused by his private school’s wrestling coach.

  And yet, as Griffin writes of these events in the first paragraph of his novel, “It didn’t seem strange at the time.”

  Calling it his novel is a bit of authorial trickery: Griffin Hurt doesn’t exist. He’s the narrator of Adam Ross’ “Playworld,” a coming-of-age tale set largely in Manhattan in 1980-81. Ross’ acclaimed first novel, “Mr. Peanut” was often described as a meta-textual Mobius strip of a procedural about a possible murder. “Playworld,’ by contrast, is fully grounded in the day-to-day. It’s an expansive novel but one that captures that time and era in gritty and vibrant detail, a story filled with both hurt and humor.

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  It’s also filled with autobiographical detail, though as Ross likes to say, it “rhymes with my life,” meaning he has reworked kernels of his own experience. But the differences are notable: he had a shorter acting career, although he was one of two finalists for a role in “On Golden Pond,” which might have changed his life if he’d landed it; and in terms of an abusive coach in his life, he worked with a watchdog group to get the man banned.

  Like Ross, Griffin also lost a childhood apartment to a fire; in the aftermath of that trauma, Ross notes, Griffin begins “masking, creating space between his own face and his emotion. That masking helps Griffin as an actor but hurts his ability to communicate his emotions, his wants and fears.

  In “Playworld” too many adults in Griffin’s life take that era’s popular notion that kids are people too as an excuse to be careless with these Gen X teens instead of providing parenting or guidance.

  “We had so much freedom,” said Ross. “But my brother likes to say we were raised by wolves.”

  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  Q. First novels are often autobiographical coming-of-age tales. Yours was a wildly ambitious, experimental saga. Then after a book of short stories you wrote “Playworld.” Why do it in that order?

  I’ve been thinking about this subject matter since 1999 but to tap those aspects of my childhood, I wanted to be at the top of my game and have as much distance as possible. So I didn’t feel ready to tackle it nor did I have a clear idea of the scope or the specifics of the subject matter and dramatic arc.

  This book took so long because you’re inventing things and bending your experience to make that character different from you, to arrive at something decoupled from autobiography. One small example: Like Griffin, I did a show at Studio 8H, where “Saturday Night Live” was shot. But I didn’t have this boiling resentment Griffin has about spending his summer there. If I were writing a memoir I’d talk about how the NBC commissary was awesome and about taking friends up to see bands or the SNL cast rehearse.

  Q. Griffin’s emotional growth is often endangered by adults’ laissez-faire attitude or is actively undercut by their behavior. How much of that is specific to that time and place?

  That’s a big subject of the novel. Gen X kids are resilient and tough but we also nearly got killed 700 times. So there are scars.

  There’s a political dimension to this too, that the book talks about vis-a-vis the Reagan era. There was this monumental shift in tax policy in this country, and deregulation: the idea of less government is better. Well, we had less parenting, we had deregulated parenting. It’s like [the single mother] Naomi and [wrestling coach] Kepplemen embody the 1980s: get mine now, take a loan on future generations that you’re not going to repay and that will cost them.

  Naomi gives him a desperately needed kind of maternal attention and Kepplemen teaches him important things for wrestling and life about constantly moving and not getting stuck. But these are predators. They damage him, they hurt him.

  Q. Kepplemen is eventually banished and Naomi vanishes for a large chunk of the book. Was it important for you to give Griffin a chance to be on his own and have normal teenage experiences and make normal teenage mistakes?

  Absolutely, yes. Griffin is almost allowed to be a kid and that changes the whole tone. In Griffin’s Morning in America, he imagines walking down the beach with this girl Amanda, holding hands and listening to cheesy songs. But, of course, that doesn’t happen.

  Q. Griffin tells Naomi he’s going to be a writer and she asks if he’s going to spill his secrets. It’s a meta moment for a writer spilling his secrets. Were you wary about the audience focusing on the distance between you and Griffin?

  As the writer of “Mr. Peanut,” I welcome a meta-textual element, I’m open about the autobiographical elements. I also love that moment because there’s a vindictive element, where Griffin is hitting back at Naomi but also he’s salvaging/redeeming all of this terrible stuff through art. So this is the moment where Griffin states explicitly, “You’re reading my book” and that’s an important distinction.

  Q. How do you balance Griffin in the moment and Griffin looking back?

  It took me at least a year to get that narrative strategy under control. It’s like being in an aquarium. The narrator from the future will take you right up to the glass and an orca will swim up but we can pull back. But I wanted the reader to experience the more terrible or hilarious events in the present for Griffin, so up close you have a visceral response.

  Q. There are a couple of phenomenal set pieces, one being when Griffin and his friends stumble upon a guy standing on a rock in Central Park, who explains the meaning of life while telling his own story, which only Griffin’s brother claims to understand. Can you talk about that?

  What I’m trying to capture is how there were certain things we saw when we were alone with other kids that were so freaking beautiful and strange. Did you figure out who the guy was? Listen, dude, nobody does. It is one of the biggest Easter eggs in the book. The reader should at least suspect it’s someone who impacts everyone in the book later on.

  To me, that’s what a big novel can do. It can say, “We’re going to be here for a while, so I’m going to go in this direction.”

  But yes, there’s also a meta-textual level where the prose goes on afterburners and is stylistically different. I think that’s Griffin, the writer.

  Q. Another set piece is Griffin’s dad telling the story of his first true love.

  That’s, again, Future Griffin. He’s trying to fully flesh out everyone as this writer was trying to – I’m trying to get beyond binary thinking about people. So in the beginning, Elliot, the therapist, doesn’t get Griffin at all or isn’t even interested in Griffin but by the end, they’re having really foundational conversations.

  With his father, Griffin takes this story and gives it extraordinary momentum and tragic pathos. It also serves as a kind of backstory for his father that shows you why he’s the person he is without forgiving his toxic masculinity.

  Griffin is a reliable reporter but he gets poetic license with these stories. It’s “Playworld.” It’s about actors, people taking center stage and saying, “Let me tell you a story.”

• Electric Literature - https://electricliterature.com/adam-ross-discusses-child-actors-ethics-and-the-inspiration-behind-playworld/

  Adam Ross Discusses Child Actors, Ethics, and the Inspiration Behind “Playworld”
  The novelist talks about his stewardship of The Sewanee Review, Gen X parenting, and the failures of adulthood

  Jan 10, 2025
  Morgan Leigh Davies
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  Adam Ross’s new novel Playworld, a 500-page epic, chronicles a year or so in the life of 14-year-old Griffin Hurt, a reluctant child actor whose life changes when his parents’ friend Naomi falls in love with him. Griffin’s account of his coming of age, from wrestling meets to contentious family dinners to clandestine meetings with Naomi, is irresistibly immersive, a fully-realized portrait of both an adolescent psyche and of Manhattan in the early 1980s.

  Ross, who has previously published the novel Mr. Peanut (2010) and the short story collection Ladies and Gentleman (2011), drew on his own experience in crafting Playworld: as a child growing up in Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s, he worked briefly as a child actor, starring in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) and also wrestling competitively. But as Ross made sure to explain in our Zoom conversation, although he used elements of his own adolescence in Playworld, the book is hardly straight autobiography.

  Instead, he blends his own historical context with rich, detailed realist prose, invoking writers like Anton Chekhov, Alice McDermott, and Edward St. Aubyn “who make a full commitment to immersion and world-building” as reference points. As in the work of these authors and the Victorian realists we discussed in our conversation, Playworld asks ethical questions of its reader without falling back on didactic moral lessons. The adults who surround Griffin, from Naomi to his wrestling coach to the actors and directors he works with to his parents, are more concerned with their own needs than those of the children around them, leaving Griffin adrift and at times vulnerable. As he says in one of the novel’s most memorable lines, “Adults … were the ocean in which I swam.”

  I spoke to Ross about his stewardship of The Sewanee Review, where he has worked as an editor since 2017, and the artistic decisions grounding Playworld.

  Morgan Leigh Davies: The realist prose in this novel feels like it’s coming from the 19th century, which is a shift from your first novel, Mr. Peanut. What do you think you get from that traditionalist style?

  Adam Ross: I have wanted to write about my childhood for a long time—I remember having the title Playworld above my computer when I was a journalist back in the very early aughts. I just didn’t feel like I had enough purchase on the experiences. I think about, for instance, Saul Bellow in Augie March, just pouring all of his talent in his third book into his childhood experiences in a voice that he felt was more his voice. So as a prelude to answering the question, there was a real desire to be ready to take on the fullness of the experience, because you’re writing a bildungsroman on a certain level, you’re writing a kunstleroman on a certain level, but you also need all the weapons at your disposal to write about love, to write—I would like to think—convincingly about women and women’s experience at a certain time.

  There are some moments of formal flight and play in Playworld, but even those formal instances which shift the point of view are deeply committed to life in the world as we live it. There’s also that sub-theme of Dungeons and Dragons and world-building and how the city is such a magical place in crazy ways, how crazy coincidences happen to you. You run into people you haven’t seen in forever that you dream about—how is it possible that these things happen? So there’s this weird way that New York City, like Venice in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, is this floating, magical, non-realist place, but we experience it as deeply realist.

  That’s really what I wanted to do. I wanted to basically bring all of my abilities as a realist to bear, and all of my language and storytelling powers to bear on a lived life experience.

  MLD: From the acknowledgments, I could tell there was material in it that was connected to your life, but I don’t know that I would have sensed that otherwise. It’s very different from, for instance, the Rachel Cusk school of autofiction.

  AR: Yeah, I don’t consider it autofictional at all.

  MLD: No, it’s clearly not. So what was the process of drawing on that childhood experience, but transforming it so dramatically? The main character in this, Griffin, is so clearly and distinctly a fictional character. The most interesting thing about the book to me is his lack of insight into what is going on, which is also mitigated by the fact that he’s looking back at these events at certain moments in the novel.

  AR: When I was working with my editors on it, we would talk about the two aspects of Griffin. We would talk about Griffin future, which is the Griffin who’s occasionally dropping in, and Griffin present. You know, there’s this great quote by Harold Brodkey; he talks about his disdain for recollection and tranquility. He says, I want to be on my knees before the event.

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  I was really interested in tonally and experientially rendering a very particular kind of childhood that I think doesn’t exist anymore. Sometimes it’s a little bit like in Charlie Brown, where the kids are together, and the adult comes over and they’re like, wah-wah-wah, wah-wah-wah, wah-wah. But of course, in Playworld, sometimes the adults are like, wah-wah, and then the adults are like, WAAAH. [Ross menacingly “zooms” his face into the camera.] The way I thought about it was, how do I create that experience for the reader of being in an aquarium, and you get close enough to the aquarium glass, and the beluga whale swims up to you, and you stop realizing there’s glass.

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  I wanted to get to the way in which kids and adults interacted at that time, which didn’t seem strange. When you’re a child actor, and you’re often the only kid around, adults come up to you and will hit you with crazy adult content, and it was just a time where adults thought that was fine. Griffin is a character who, in the early goings of the book, because of his early experiences and also because of his conditioning with his parents, learns how to disappear. He disappears behind a kind of mask, and part of Playworld is him stepping into his own idea of what role he needs to play.

  In one of the first interviews I did for The Sewanee Review Podcast, I interviewed Garth Greenwell, and he talked about how in order to write his novels, he needs an absolutely complete command of setting, because he believes that by just rendering things with that degree of literalism, the symbology and metaphor rise up out of that. So the aspects of Playworld that resemble my life, that is me drawing on settings and experiences that I have total command of and authority over. But my brother never rode a horse on a golf course, you know what I mean? And I wasn’t on a hit TV show, but I certainly know what that looks like.

  MLD: There are moments in the book where Griffin is performing in different ways—in a gendered way with Naomi, and in a physical way, both with her, and while wrestling. I’m interested in the duality between the ways in which he can perform and find pleasure, versus when the performance is kind of a sense of obligation to the adults.

  AR : Griffin is a creature of dissembling. He dissembles to protect himself. He is split off from himself, so his capacity to perform and hide behind the mask is, in those cases, self-protective. But I think on some deep level, the character senses that he disempowered by that act of hiding. But in the case of wrestling, there’s nowhere to hide, there’s no faking it or dissembling. You are exposed. Griffin’s gravitation towards wrestling becomes a more authentic form of self-protection and self-discovery. If you grapple with somebody your weight and comparatively your age, you’re gonna know who you are. So much work went into showing how part of the drama of a martial art is coming to terms with yourself and being exposed and dealing with your weaknesses in real time. Griffin knows he’s on solid ground, even if he’s getting his ass kicked.

  MLD: Well, it’s one of the only places in the book where he’s failing.

  AR: I think that that’s one of the things that I really wanted to drill down into, not as an object lesson, but as somebody who ended up becoming a regional and state champion—I got my ass handed to me for two years. I feel so grateful for the way in which I had room to have this odyssey and this sport that was all mine, that gave back to me so much, but required I deal with fucking failure, just massive failure. To still come back from that forged me.

  You should come out of Playworld seeing not that Griffin is triumphant, but with inklings of how he’s got some tools to be okay, and also how some enduring vulnerabilities and forms of damage that are going to leave a mark. That goes back to realism. I think novels do this so powerfully, the way they arc beyond the frame. I wanted to do that on a big scale.

  MLD: As I mentioned, I was thinking about all the Victorian novelists when I was reading it, especially Dickens, who in a way created the idea of childhood in the nineteenth century. Those writers didn’t create the novel, but they created the novel as a space for elucidating what it was like to be an exploited child. How can the novel get into that experience, of grooming and exploitation, in a way that other mediums can’t?

  AR: Part of the creation of that childhood had a lot to do with the way in which, in my lived experience and in that historical moment, every adult in the book who is egocentric or narcissistic or self-centered also reveals themselves, to a person, to have really important, edifying things to give to Griffin. All those things make up the geologic stratifications of his entire character. There’s no Rosetta Stone for character. It’s not like this one thing happens and then that becomes the black hole that sucks all experience into it. Griffin is just moving through these experiences, and they are impacting him. Some are bouncing off of him. He’s dodging some, he’s relishing some. I think that that dynamism is part of what I was trying to get at. Playworld is trying to show that you start to put all these things together later.

  With regard, for instance, to grooming, there are key revealing moments where Griffin, if we stick with the language of undersea experience, starts to come up to the closer to the surface. The climactic moments with Keppelmen, the wrestling coach, he gets a handle on what kind of relationship he’s in, but he doesn’t get resolution. I think one of the things that’s so interesting in the culture right now about these matters is, there’s this desire for the scales to be balanced, and I don’t think life works like that.

  MLD: Back to the question of insight: we know that Griffin lacks it because he’s a child, but the adults also completely lack insight, right? These people he’s interacting with, from someone like Naomi who clearly is doing something wrong, to his dad, who is forcing him to have this adult role as an actor, which he clearly shouldn’t have.

  AR: There’s that great Philip Larkin poem, “This Be the Verse,” They fuck you up, your mom and dad, they don’t mean to, but they do. It goes back to a historical excavation of the way in which kids were parented back then. Adults neither gave thought to nor had any compunction about being messy adults in front of their kids. Full stop. When they were around. My brother and I were getting to school alone in first grade, on the bus, riding our bikes across town, no helmets, calling Mom, saying, We made it! Just be home at six. The latchkey generation gets looked back on nostalgically as, Oh, we were so tough. We were so independent. We were so street-smart. But we also had the shit kicked out of us. I would not trade that grit for anything, but in terms of ethics, I think that one of the things that I really wanted Playworld to accomplish was to have a really good look at that.

  The Gen X parents now have made this massive correction in terms of attention. So much freaking attention on your kids. What’s going on today? I’m your best friend. How can I help you? You know what I mean? Then everyone’s like, The kids today, they’re so anxious. They’re terrified. They can’t encounter the world. Uh, I know why. Because the Gen X correction was to interpolate themselves. I guarantee you that like my two daughters, who are fantastic and doing great, are gonna look back on how they were raised and are gonna say, Boy, Dad, that was so fucked up what you did. And you’re like, But I was trying to fix my childhood!

  Nobody thinks their childhood is unique. But I was trying to be historically accurate—not autobiographically accurate, but historically accurate—about the ways in which adults didn’t feel compelled to edit themselves. They could just as easily blast you as they could desert you to go and enjoy whatever they wanted to enjoy, and they didn’t think for one second about you dealing with it, and they assumed that if they were gonna leave you alone for a weekend, you would survive on cereal and television.

  MLD: In terms of those adults, I found the most disturbing scenes with Naomi not the sex, or anything physical, but when she was almost acting like a therapist to Griffin. But then she then starts wanting things from him emotionally.

  AR: That’s the biggest failure of adulthood. And I would hope that it’s a very, very scary portrait of how grooming operates. Grooming operates partially by keen insight. Griffin almost explicitly describes Keppelmen as a giant squid. When he first encounters Keppelmen, Keppelmen is immediately like, Oh, you’re the mark. But the thing is, Griffin’s just one of a lot of marks. It’s very much like a truffle pig and in a field of truffles. That’s what’s so disturbing.

  When I was young, literature was organized vertically and now literature is organized horizontally, and it’s polyphonic.

  It was not on that continuum yet of people saying, Oh, this is asymmetrical. This is psychologically destructive. This has knock-on effects that are terrible. We were unlearning that way of being. We didn’t have language for that. Not at all. Part of Playworld’s artfulness was, How do I create a character who is living in a world where there isn’t that language?

  Naomi’s car is like a love nest and therapist couch, and Naomi is an analysand. So she’s using some of these tools to do bad things, but she’s not a completely bad person.

  MLD: Right at the beginning of the book, you flag this for the reader. They’re all seeing the same therapist and they go hang out at his house.

  AR: To me, that’s is another thing about that era, to talk about language. Here are some of the catchwords we see all the time, like narcissism, asymmetry, boundaries. My eldest daughter is 18, my younger daughter is 17, and for last four years, they would say, I had to throw up a boundary. And I was like, what? Like, what are you talking about?

  I didn’t even know what the fuck that was when I was young, which again goes to the whole idea of performance. In a novel about a child actor in the age of the first actor president, in the various roles you’re supposed to play to protect yourself in a boundless world, an oceanic world—that’s what the book’s about.

  MLD: What’s the effect of reading so much for The Sewanee Review, and editing all the time? How does that affects the process of writing?

  AR: Well, I mean, the crazy thing is that I mentioned interviewing Garth Greenwell. And then I could talk about interviewing Lisa Taddeo, or Stephanie Danler, or Melissa Febos, or Sidik Fofana, or Alice McDermott. This is to me a perfect answer to your question, talking with Alice McDermott while I was still in the throes of editing Playworld, about how Shakespeare for her is such a touchstone. And in Playworld, obviously Shakespeare is enormously important as part a literary education. So to have someone who I admire to the roof beams like Alice talk about the vitality for her of Shakespeare, but then also, you’re in a conversation with someone like Alice McDermott and she’ll say something like this—she’ll go, Nobody upon reading a great novel ever closed the book and said, This book would have been better if it were finished sooner.

  So part of the Review is an embarrassment of riches, where you’re in conversation with these people and you’re in conversation with them on the page. Your nine to five job is participating in literature. And your nine to five job is helping writers in certain cases make better choices, because we edit the heck out of the writers we work with. That leads to a lot of aesthetic discussions about dramatic choices and about choices about sentences and lines. It’s kind of like training for the freaking Olympics because like you’re just in training a lot and so it keeps you like super sharp. Does it slow you down? Yeah, I mean, it slows you down.

  I’ll say another thing. You may think this is the brightest time in America, you may think it’s the darkest time. But you know what, if you work at The Sewanee Review, you know literature’s in good shape. We may look back and see this as an incredible moment in literature. When I was young, literature was organized vertically—there were these great writers—and now literature is organized horizontally, and it’s polyphonic. There are great writers from every walk of life and from all over the globe and we get more of it. In fact, as my great teacher Stanley Elkin used to say, less is less, more is more, and enough is enough. And we’re definitely in a more is more moment.

  About the Author
  Morgan Leigh Davies is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in publications including Bustle, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and the LARB. You can find more of her work at mldavies.com.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/adam-ross-on-chronicling-a-reagan-era-new-york-city-childhood/

  Adam Ross on Chronicling a Reagan-Era New York City Childhood
  Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of “Playworld”
  By Jane Ciabattari
  January 7, 2025
  Adam Ross’s second novel (after 2010’s Mr. Peanut) is a dense, intense coming-of-age story about Griffin, a teenager growing up on the Upper West Side, balancing his jobs as an actor and student, his real-life roles as a son and brother, his passion for wrestling and the women who enter his life, one by one, as if they are a cast that will lead him to what he hopes will be his one true love. What was the inspiration for the novel, and the title? “I wanted to write a novel that captured the essence of my childhood, one that rhymed with my life as a young adult,” Ross explains.

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  “Like Griffin, I was a child actor who appeared in movies and television programs, and performed in dramatic radio. What this meant was that, like Griffin, I often found myself the only child among a group of adults, in a professional setting with all the same associated perils and pitfalls and boundary-shattering behavior, as well as some remarkable instruction. Like Griffin, I was passionate about the sport of wrestling. Like Griffin, my parents both worked in the arts: my mother was a former professional dancer and my father was a Broadway musical performer and voiceover actor. So it happened that, like Griffin, I was often around legends such as Alan Jay Lerner, Leonard Bernstein, Jacques D’Amboise, and Josh Logan, to name just a few.

  “It’s unique enough, being raised in Manhattan, but especially in the 1980s, when, ironically for Griffin, who suffers from certain forms of destructive adult attention, our childhood had a Neverland quality. We were just so free. I like to tell people how my brother and I got to school on our own in first grade, taking public transit alone or riding our bikes across town, helmetless. I think about the wonders we witnessed in that unsupervised time. The near-death experiences we survived, the mayhem we caused. The New York of my memory, as gritty and dangerous as it was, was enchanting—in large part because of this freedom, one that is unimaginable to kids now and inconceivable for contemporary parents to grant.

  “It was in this world where we were at play.”

  Our email conversation crossed the continent as the holidays approached.

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  Jane Ciabattari: How have these years of pandemic and turmoil affected your life and your work, the writing and launch of Playworld?

  In a novel about the ways in which the adults cash a check on their children’s future…I am here to tell you that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
  Adam Ross: If by “turmoil” you’re talking about our country’s divisive political landscape, well, writing Playworld was, at times, a slightly uncanny experience, since it is set at the end of the Carter Administration and the beginning of the Reagan era. Ever since Reagan, the line between politics and entertainment has become even thinner and more porous. In both 2016 and 2024, Trump, with his combination of showmanship and stagecraft—gifts for straight talk and hucksterism—proved himself to be a direct descendant of our first actor president. Like Reagan, he has captured the American imagination. Like Reagan, his sloganeering is remarkable. Reagan’s, of course, was two-pronged: Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. And: It’s morning in America. Like Reagan, Trump’s second term has been inaugurated by a rightward shift that hearkens back to the 1980 election, which was so decisive and surprising to many in the country and whose electoral map looked almost as monochromatic. Like Reagan, Trump came within millimeters of being assassinated.

  During both administrations, massive tax cuts were given to the rich. At a climactic moment in the novel, Reagan signs the Economic Tax Act of 1981, a bill that cut rates across the board by about 30%. The effect: Reagan began his administration with a national debt of $900 billion and ended his second term at a figure of $2.6 trillion. I could go on but maybe, in one the craziest ironies, I think it’s the wealth gap the Reagan administration’s policy inaugurated that led to the social and economic factors that have helped fuel MAGA populism. In a novel about the ways in which the adults cash a check on their children’s future—checks they have no interest in paying—I am here to tell you that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

  JC: Why set this novel during the 1980s with historic moments like the Carter-Reagan presidential campaigns, the heyday of Studio 54, and Dungeons & Dragons? What research was involved in setting these scenes?

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  AR: Because the early years of the 80’s were so consequential—socially, culturally, and politically. We have been having the same conversation about taxes and debt since then. It hasn’t really changed. Nor has the conversation, or argument, about the role of government. Because we were in proxy wars with Russia. To expand on my earlier answer, the novel’s hero, Griffin—a child actor in the age of the actor-president—is buffeted by the novel’s adults, who stand in for the political sphere. Gen X kids like me, who experienced what at times seemed like a complete lack of supervision in our lives, operated in a system of smaller parental governance for sure.

  At the same time, there is a hunger among overly-surveilled, helicoptered kids today for the kind of freedom their parents experienced in their own childhoods, and for the analog lifestyle. Some of the dangers we navigated as kids back then have led to a massive correction in how we, as adults, parent—an overcorrection, in my opinion, though I wouldn’t want my kids to go through what I did as a boy.

  I did a ton of research for the novel. I read numerous books on the Reagan era and I’ll name a few: The Triumph of Politics, The Age of Reagan, Rawhide Down. Books that tried to name the zeitgeist like The Culture of Narcissism. Books on John Hinckley, Jr. and Mark David Chapman. Books on the entertainment industry. Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. Books my parents were reading, like The Fifty-Minute Hour. In the end, however, you have to jettison all that knowledge, trust your protagonist’s worm’s eye view, and make it all up. I went to Studio 54 a lot, and for the first time when I was in the eighth grade. Although there are kids around Griffin who are going, he never gets there. And the book never really goes there either. But my word, you should’ve seen me back then, in my bandana, dancing on that nightclub’s speakers.

  JC: At fourteen, Griffin becomes enmeshed with Naomi Shah, a married friend of his parents, at a party his family’s psychologist is hosting. Later, he runs into her outside of the Julliard School, near his home, where her kids study ballet, and she parks her car waiting for them. It’s in her car that they have intimate conversations, ultimately being private together regularly on a dead-end street near the Hudson River. Griffin is naïve and captivated; Naomi is attracted to him but careful about how far they go. It’s a complicated relationship, which would have been seen in harsher light today. How did this plotline evolve? And how does it influence the growing interest Griffin has in Amanda, who attends a nearby school and captures his attention?

  AR: Like Mr. Kepplemen, Griffin’s abusive wrestling coach, the character of Naomi is another adult in the novel who, by her behavior, embodies the era’s get-mine-now ethos. Like Kepplemen, her interactions with Griffin, albeit destructive, are transacted in gray areas, which is not to say that both aren’t predatory, but it is to emphasize that both characters impart lessons to Griffin that are, in spite of their method of delivery, edifying, even foundational. Damaged people can teach us worthwhile things. And Naomi is helping him articulate his frustration about his lack of agency: He doesn’t want to be an actor, but he wants the things acting provides, and she connects him with his conflicted feelings by giving him the attention he desperately needs. But it comes with a terrible price tag and, just like the era’s costs, arrives well beyond the novel’s frame. Do things go any better for Griffin when he falls in love with Amanda, someone his own age? Nope. Why? Because his tutelage in intimacy is more of a miseducation. It’s sad to think about all the things we’re taught as normal that we have to spend the rest of our lives unlearning.

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  JC: Griffin appears on an episode of Allen Funt’s Candid Camera in which he’s paired with Muhammad Ali. When Ali learns his name, he says, “The mythological creature…Guardian of great treasures. What’re you protecting, boy?’” What led you to choose that name? What does it say about Griffin’s ongoing quest in this novel?

  AR: Griffin’s full name is Griffin Hurt. His father’s given name is Hertzberg, and he changes it when he becomes an actor like so many other Jewish actors have (Cary Grant, Lauren Bacall, Harrison Ford, to name a few). A part of Griffin’s name, then, points to the theme of assimilation, one which his father suffers in the novel. His name is also a nod to one of my favorite actors of that era, William Hurt, who starred in one of my most beloved, hokey, and mind-bending movies of 1980, the year the novel takes place, which is Altered States, and concerns a scientist who goes through all sorts of drug-induced, physical and psychological devolutions and regressions in a quest for love. Another favorite movie of that era is Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, which stars Griffin Dunne and is about a guy who lives in uptown Manhattan and, over the course of one dark night, goes through all sorts of perils and struggles while trying to get home. There is, of course, a fantasy theme in the novel—Griffin’s a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast—and he is in transformation over the course of this seminal year in his life, not only learning what to protect and what he values. Because he is also deformed by these events, Griffin becomes monstrous in certain ways. Griffins aren’t bad monsters, in my opinion. I know that when I played D&D, I was always on the lookout for one I might train as a winged steed. Little known but geeky fact: the Greek god Apollo rode a gryphon.

  JC: Griffin’s father is an actor, too. His dreams have not materialized, but his voice has become familiar from advertisements (“It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”). Then he gets a part in a new Broadway show, directed by Jose Ferrer, with music by Hershey Kay, who orchestrated the music for A Chorus Line, and income to help the family (Griffin’s acting job helps pay for his private school tuition). Meanwhile, Griffin gets a part in Take Two, a film whose cast includes Diane Lane, Jill Clayburgh, and Shelley Duvall. His dad is both competitive and proud. What’s the source of this nuanced father-son relationship?

  AR: Griffin’s relationship with his father is absolutely rooted in autobiography, but my father’s career was bigger and more accomplished than Shel Hurt’s. And my father certainly wasn’t competitive with me. I had the pleasure of performing with him on several episodes of NBC’s hour-long, dramatic radio program The Eternal Light. Also, on the level of raw talent, I have nowhere near the abilities he had. He attended Julliard. He’s a remarkable singer and pianist. He starred in all sorts of productions, and if you follow me on Instagram (@adamrosswriter), there’s a great clip of him as The Commander in Tom Jones’s and Harvey Schmidt’s off-Broadway masterpiece Philemon. With Griffin and his father, I’m really playing with the idea of what it means to get the role of a lifetime and what it means to choose your own role in life, which often requires closing the door on certain (sometimes seemingly remarkable) opportunities.

  The city itself is constantly molting, getting torn down and being built up. I’m trying to recapture a very particular kind of wonder one experienced back then.
  JC: Griffin’s Candid Camera appearance leads to roles in a late seventies paranoid thriller The Talon Effect and then the Saturday morning TV show The Nuclear Family, which he shoots during summers. In the second half of the novel, he gets a major role in film. What research/real life experience shaped the narrative of his acting career?

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  AR: The Candid Camera production team regularly came to my public elementary school and I, like Griffin, was hip to the game but never made it on the show, dammit. And I was also on an NBC television series that ran for one season called Hot Hero Sandwich, in which I played, among other roles, a character named Captain Hero. We shot that at 30 Rock, at the 8-H studio, the home of Saturday Night Live. The cool part: this was produced in 1978, when the original SNL cast was around, so I’d have run-ins with all of those folks. And we had the same production crew too.

  JC: I lived for many years on Seventh-fifth Street between Central Park West and Columbus, and had a house in Sag Harbor, so I recognize many of the locations in Playworld. How were you able to create such detailed and lush descriptions of places like Lincoln Towers, where Griffin and his actor father and scholarly mother and younger brother live; the Boyd Prep where Griffin is a lackadaisical student, restaurants like Lenge near Lincoln Center (now closed), the Museum of Natural History, where Griffin made many visits as a boy, the Temple of Dendur at the Met, the Quogue Beach Club, and so many more?

  AR: Lots of rewriting. And then cutting and rewriting. I’ll add that the novel’s granular attention to conjuring a city that no longer exists is part of its commitment to worldbuilding, to evocation. You don’t achieve this by stuffing a novel with the era’s stuff so much as you try to capture the place’s feel, certain shades of light. If that sounds arty-farty, it is. And it isn’t. Because certain views no longer exist in Manhattan that did when I was a child there. The city itself is constantly molting, getting torn down and being built up. I’m trying to recapture a very particular kind of wonder one experienced back then.

  JC: Griffin’s mother has an intriguing connection to the iconic Joseph Pilates. Where did that originate?

  AR: My mother was, in fact, an instruction model for him.

  JC: What are you working on now/next?

  AR: My day job is the editor of the Sewanee Review. We just closed the spring issue, which features, among other contributors, some remarkable fiction from a young writer new to our pages named Daniela Garvue, a short story by Jean Chen Ho, and newly translated work by Isaac Bashevis Singer….

  JC: [interrupts] Speaking of Isaac Singer. He lived in the Belnord, at 86th and Broadway, where they now film Murders in the Building.

  AR: …as well as poetry from Gabrielle Bates and a craft essay by Sidik Fofana. As soon as I return from touring, we’ll be editing the summer issue. Being the editor of the Sewanee Review makes drafting a novel much easier, because no matter how bad things are going on the page, my nine-to-five job is collaborating with some of the best writers in America. Everyone reading this should subscribe at www.thesewaneereview.com.

  __________________________________

  Playworld by Adam Ross is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Ross, Adam PLAYWORLD Knopf (Fiction None) $29.00 1, 7 ISBN: 9780385351294

A teen actor in 1980 Manhattan grapples with the consequences of fame, his eccentric family, and the advances of a family friend.

This long-awaited follow-up toMr. Peanut (2010) and the well-received story collectionLadies and Gentlemen (2011) chronicles a season of upheaval in the life of a child actor on the cusp of adulthood. It offers a blast to the past in the vein of Garth Risk Hallberg'sCity on Fire (2015) and the existential angst of Donna Tartt'sThe Goldfinch (2013), but lacks much in the way of pathos. The book is written from the point of view of Griffin Hurt, an otherwise ordinary prep school student whose actor father pressured him into show business. What's meant to make Griffin unique is his role as popular Peter Proton on an NBC show calledThe Nuclear Family, but we barely see any of those experiences. Instead, the show and its accompanying fame serve as an albatross around Griffin's neck that interferes with his true passion: wrestling for the school team. Meanwhile, Griffin's parents are distant and self-absorbed, while his younger brother, Oren, although personable, mostly exists as a sounding board and partner in crime for Griffin. Instead, Ross pulls his inciting incident straight fromThe Graduate with the introduction of Naomi Shah, an older friend of Griffin's parents whose unhappy marriage and impulsive tendencies lead her toward predation. As Griffin lies through sessions with the family therapist and his storied career threatens to derail his own ambitions, his avoidance mirrors the novel's narrative pitfall: plenty of movement but no real change. With no true villain and nowhere for the story to go, readers may find themselves anxiously awaiting a climax that never comes.

An intriguing coming-of-age story that's rich in atmosphere but falls short on resolution.

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"Ross, Adam: PLAYWORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883751/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f95607e. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

Playworld

Adam Ross. Knopf, $29 (528p) ISBN 978-0-385-35129-4

Family dysfunction and the challenges of adolescence lie at the heart of this compulsively readable outing from Ross (Mr. Peanut). In the book's most salacious and impactful plot thread, narrator Griffin Hurt looks back with vivid detail and analytical compassion on his teen years in the 1980s, beginning with the affair he had at 14 with family friend Naomi Shah, 22 years his senior. Other story lines delve into Griffin's career as a child actor and his time on the high school wrestling team. Though the affair ends midway through the novel, Naomi's friendship with Griffin's parents, who don't know about the affair, causes him continued distress. Ross also offers a poignant depiction of the pressure Griffin faces in show business, as his father urges him to take an audition with renowned director Paul Mazursky, whom Griffin's never heard of, while he'd prefer to focus on wrestling. Ross casts the period in a dark light, touching on the turbulence of such historical episodes as the Iran hostage crisis and the Reagan assassination attempt while laying bare the moral emptiness of the adults in Griffin's life. Readers will enjoy getting caught up in this sharp, discursive narrative. (Jan.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Playworld." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 37, 30 Sept. 2024, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811729238/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c72fec26. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

Ladies and Gentlemen

Adam Ross. Knopf, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-307-27071-9

This competent if unspectacular collection from Mr. Peanut author Ross lacks a standout, with each tale only fitfully coming alive, usually when the plot turns Cruel. In "Futures," an unemployed man goes for a series of progressively stranger job interviews while also coming to the aid of a neighbor, both to crushing results. In "The Rest of It," a maintenance man's story of a crazy night out leaves an academic with a moral quandary and an excuse to speak to his ex-wife. "When in Rome" is a mini-epic of betrayal, and "Ladies and Gentlemen" is the story of a married woman flying cross-country to meet a man "she'd kissed in college nearly two decades ago." "In the Basement," the most memorable of these dark pieces, is an existential horror story triggered by a Christmas card. There are crisp turns of phrase--a character in "Futures" likens his walking around with a fat wad of cash in his pocket to "how a camel must feel about his hump"--and some memorable images, but the stories tend to ramble and too often depend on long stretches of characters talking or reminiscing to advance plots. While Ross is clearly talented, the short story isn't his metier. (June)

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"Ladies and Gentlemen." Publishers Weekly, vol. 258, no. 17, 25 Apr. 2011, p. 111. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A255087615/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=775f4390. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

Ross, Adam LADIES AND GENTLEMEN Knopf (Adult Fiction) $24.95 6, 30 ISBN: 978-0-3072-7071-9

Following his dazzling debut, Ross drops seven more doses of disquieting fears and misleading hopes.

Having established his penchant for head-turning narrative architecture in his much-lauded first novel, Ross (Mr. Peanut, 2010) wrings bleakly funny, if somewhat panicky moments out of this fierce collection of short stories. The opener, "Futures," drills straight down into the collective discomfort of the American middle class. A man dressed in his best suit tries desperately to hide his anxiety moments before a job interview, fantasizing that his interviewer might just be an attractive woman with a job offer to save his life. His cynicism is tempered, a little, by his affection for his neighbor and her troubled son. But as with most things in America, the wish granted is a far cry from the wish envisioned. In "The Rest of It," a small-minded professor's run-in with an aggressive maintenance man turns his thoughts to the human condition. "Because the world seemed too wide, its fortunes too random, and its blessings too fleeting to honor one man's bravery-or to punish his cowardice," Ross writes. A remembered tale of college hijinks ends with an awful blow in "The Suicide Room," while "When In Rome" details the consequences of a long-standing rivalry between two brothers, one a citizen of sorts and the other your basic lowlife. One of Ross' great strengths is walking that eternally fine line between showing the reader things-a bloody fistfight between brothers, or a Twilight Zone-esque reveal-and the heartbeat monitoring of a character's internal life. The latter comes into play in the finely honed title story, in which a traveling freelance writer weighs a life-changing moment against the stories she might tell a stranger someday about that very decision. In those moments, these characters are either untethered by their own vividness or weighed down with all the trouble in the world. In either case, it's impossible to look away.

A fine collection of stories.

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"Ross, Adam: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2011. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A256559690/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72c0311d. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

By Adam Ross

243 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

Adam Ross's first novel, ''Mr. Peanut,'' which came out last year, showcased blazingly original work by a writer whose influences ranged from Raymond Chandler to Italo Calvino. His second book, a collection of stories, confirms the promise of his first. ''Ladies and Gentlemen'' is clever in all the right ways, even while paying homage to the most traditional of forms.

The momentum in Ross's stories comes from storytelling itself. A stage is set, and then one character usurps the narrative by telling a new tale, pushing the story in unpredictable directions. These embedded narratives arrive effortlessly, in a page from Chekhov's playbook that has also figured in the work of Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, among others, making the story within a story a standard device of 20th-century fiction.

Ross turns the trick in admirably contemporary fashion. Instead of, say, arriving at a guesthouse and swapping stories after supper, as they might in Chekhov, these characters seem exhausted by stories, often telling them with a strange reluctance. The difference is partly one of structure -- Ross's embedded narratives feel organic rather than orchestrated -- and partly one of mood. Where Chekhov's stories within stories are frequently presented as entertainments, Ross's tend to come fraught with menace.

''Futures'' is the strongest story here, a novella-length tale of an unemployed 43-year-old dilettante waiting out a run of bad luck. When he has an odd yet promising interview at a company run by a beautiful woman, it lifts his spirits enough that he strikes up a friendship with his neighbor's grown (and also unemployed) son. The story feels, continually, as if it's about to veer into the surreal; danger is on the way, but the reader has no idea where it will come from or how. It's a thrillingly unsettling story. When I finished it, I immediately went back and started again, eager to duplicate the rush. On second reading, it called to mind Chekhov's classic story of false hope, ''The Kiss.''

The other stories in ''Ladies and Gentlemen'' deliver a less intense variation of this thrill. A particular highlight is ''The Rest of It,'' about a lonely English professor who makes an impulsive promise to the garrulous custodian who fixes his office heating. ''We should organize this material,'' the professor says of the man's nonstop stream of stories. ''We could make a book out of it.'' The custodian is delighted by the idea, soon revealing a dark secret the professor can't bear to keep. He regrets ever chatting with the man.

Ross often examines the ways failure can poison marriages and other relationships. Occasionally the book suffers from sameness of language and scope, relying on old tricks (especially the epiphanic final sentence) rather than the innovation Ross demonstrated in ''Mr. Peanut.'' Still, these are all-/enveloping tales, well paced, tense and driven by effortless prose. Reading them, you often want to leave the room before things get out of hand. But the stories are too riveting to abandon, the kind that make you ignore repeated calls to dinner.

The collection's title story is about a married journalist sent to Nashville to write a celebrity profile. When she's offered a chance to act on a romantic fantasy with an old flame, she takes it. Or does she? At story's end, it hardly matters. The damage -- to her marriage and, more profoundly, to her emotional well-being -- is done. Like all of Ross's ambivalent, contemporary protagonists, she finds that it's ''the possible regrets that troubled her most, no matter what choice she made.''

CAPTION(S):

DRAWING (DRAWING BY MICHAEL HIRSHON)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 The New York Times Company
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Bakopoulos, Dean. "Ripple Effects." The New York Times Book Review, 24 July 2011, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A262235360/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=17a5d089. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

By Adam Ross.

July 2011. 288p. Knopf, $25.95 (9780307270719).

Ross brings the bleak, bitingly funny style of his lauded first novel, Mr. Peanut (2010), to the seven short stories in this collection. Ross limns the ills of contemporary Americans, so vividly rendering their problems and anxieties that the effect is unnerving and heartbreaking. In "Futures," 43-year-old, unemployed David Appletow imagines that a prospective job interview will completely change his fortunes, making the cruel outcome even harder to accept. In "The Rest of It," the wild stories of a maintenance man, who claims to be hiding a hit man at his house, throw a ne'er-do-well English professor into a panic. He contacts his ex-wife for advice but is brought even lower by the realization that her "new life had wiped their old one out." And in "When in Rome," two brothers carrying emotional baggage from their childhood engage in an ultraviolent fistfight that only serves to escalate their sibling rivalry. It is the precision of Ross' dark and dazzling prose, often laced with a touch of the surreal, that generates the stories' intensity and makes them so disquieting.--Joanne Wilkinson

Wilkinson, Joanne

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association
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Wilkinson, Joanne. "Ladies and Gentlemen." Booklist, vol. 107, no. 19-20, 1 June 2011, pp. 35+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A259749485/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c0fa181. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

"Ross, Adam: PLAYWORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883751/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f95607e. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025. "Playworld." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 37, 30 Sept. 2024, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811729238/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c72fec26. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025. "Ladies and Gentlemen." Publishers Weekly, vol. 258, no. 17, 25 Apr. 2011, p. 111. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A255087615/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=775f4390. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025. "Ross, Adam: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2011. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A256559690/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72c0311d. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025. Bakopoulos, Dean. "Ripple Effects." The New York Times Book Review, 24 July 2011, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A262235360/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=17a5d089. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025. Wilkinson, Joanne. "Ladies and Gentlemen." Booklist, vol. 107, no. 19-20, 1 June 2011, pp. 35+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A259749485/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c0fa181. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

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