Griffin Hurt, 14, is a preternaturally gifted actor, which is why he’s got a big part on a cheesy NBC family show. On camera, Griffin is confident and charming as hell, but offset, his world is in a constant state of turmoil. Like many child stars before him, he’s been placed in a terrible position by his family wherein his income is helping keep the family afloat. He’s paying for the fancy private school that working on the show is keeping from attending consistently enough to keep up his grades. If only that were the worst of his problems. Griffin has inadvertently drawn the attention of two adult figures in his life. His high school wrestling coach and one of his mother’s best friends.
It’s heady stuff, ripe for a big, statement novel, the kind of novel that Adam Ross clearly thinks he is writing. Sadly, for this reader anyway, Playworld is too disjointed and ineffectual to live up to its ambitions. The story meanders in bewildering ways, practically tormenting the reader by delaying gratification past the point of reason. The digressions mostly do nothing for the story.
Every bad thing readers have said about Holden Caulfield over the years applies doubly so or more to Griffin Hurt, who, despite being absolutely a victim of the adults in his life, is still kind of an obnoxious little shit who makes it hard to root for him. Some of this is normal 14-year-old boy stuff, but more than once Griffin acts in a way indistinguishable from the behavior of someone who wants to make a lot of people crazy and/or miserable as quickly as possible. He’s selfish, lazy, conceited, and quite willfully ignorant in a lot of ways, yet he speaks (the novel is in first-person) in an arch, pretentious voice that grates on the reader’s ear. That, with the lack of cohesion in the story, make it hard to have fun reading Playworld.