Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year ... It’s not a survivor’s memoir disguised in a wrestler’s too-revealing singlet. This is a bildungsroman from which anger has been vented, and what’s left behind is redolent with insight, tenderness and forgiveness ... Nothing baffles Ross as a narrator. His powers of observation and sensation seem to invade every nook of these lives like the tentacles of some giant octopus with consciousness in every sucker ... Whatever past rough experiences Ross may be mining here, they’ve been compressed under the pressure of time and genius into a cluster of literary gems.
Extraordinary ... While Griffin is an astute observer and a charming storyteller, he can’t be counted on to be a reliable narrator ... More than 500 pages long, yet I didn’t want it to end. The story is so rich and filled with intriguing — if morally questionable — characters that it’s immersive ... This entire review could be made up of sentences I underlined for their beauty.
Vivid, discomfiting ... Ross lacquers his chapters with period detail ... Morphs from nostalgic coming-of-age into something sinister and damning ... Less than the sum of its parts: six novellas in search of a common tent.
The feeling of vibrancy owes in large part to Griffin’s narration, which is wised-up yet cheerfully innocent ... Lavishly detailed ... A weakness for symbolism accounts for the thinness of other parts ... The novel’s pleasantly noodling pace picks up toward the end, when Naomi reappears with far more predatory designs. Another mark of the book’s freshness is that, even though it contains all the ingredients for a mopey story of formative traumas, Playworld never sheds its winsome optimism.
The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman and Garp. The novel is detailed, digressive, densely populated, dull at times (as life is) and capable of tracking the most minute shifts in emotional weather. It is the young and the restless, edging into the bold and the beautiful.
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.
