← All Of It with Alison Stewart
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- [00:08]
A
You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Today's show is curated by our producer Jordan Loff, featuring some of her favorite interviews that she worked on this year. Jordan, we are back to books. We are kicking off this hour with a conversation with Adam Ross, author of the new novel Plague World. I loved this book.
- [00:27]
B
I did, too. And I have to admit, this was a little bit of a case of judging the book by its cover. I got sent an advance copy and I took one look at the COVID and said, ooh, this looks like it might be good. And I was right. It seemed like a perfect fit for us. It's a coming of age story set in New York city in the 1980s. It's based very much on Adam Ross's own experiences as a child actor here in the city. And it's also about an inappropriate relationship that this boy gets into with a friend of the family, a much older woman. So it just sounded like a book that had a lot for us to discuss.
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A
And he was really excited to be here.
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B
He was really excited to be here. And I got to talk with him a little bit, you know, in the green room and just before he came on the show. And he was just so thrilled at how well received the book was and how much people were responding to it. And, you know, I think sometimes we think of writers, you know, and we know that they believe in their stuff, but I think it's always nice to be reminded that people do appreciate the validation and the criticism and words of kindness from readers. So he was just so thrilled that the book has been so well received and continues to be well received. It's one of the best things I.
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A
Read this year and it counts towards.
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B
The all of it. Summer reading challenge.
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A
All right, here's my conversation with Adam Ross about his new novel, Play World. So many details in the story, they come from your own life. How did you decide how to make this, how autobiographical to make this?
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C
I like to say that Play World rhymes with my life. You know, I was, you know, I was a, I was a child actor. My parents were in the, in the arts in Manhattan. My. But my mother was a four professional dancer. My father was on musical Broadway and was a voiceover guy. So these were settings, these were experiences that I knew well. But you know, when you're writing fiction and I would make a distinction between fiction and autofiction in the sense that you're not doing something that is so porous or so transparently your life, you have to Bend things, you have to change things. And so that was one of the reasons why I labored over the novel so long. I mean, I mean, short answer really is it's the differences in fiction that make it fiction. Right. I mean, it's, you know, I was in no way, shape or form as successful as Griffin is. I was in no way, shape or form faced with the kind of choices Griffin was.
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A
But you were a 14 year old New York.
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C
But I was 14 year old New York at a very unique time in Manhattan. And I was a New York child actor starting around the age of 11. So, you know, you were adjacent to certain kinds of greatness and adjacent to a very particular species of creative in Manhattan. Right.
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A
This is a coming of age story.
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C
Yes.
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A
Do you have a favorite coming of age story?
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C
Oh, wow, that's such a great question. You know, I'll say this. The coming of age story, if it is even really considered a buildings Roman in the strict sense of the word, and a book that was on my mind a lot, not in terms of structure, but in terms of, shall we say, energy and just a torrential amount of specificity and content, was the Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, who just, who just kind of, you know, in his third book, just kind of poured all of his talent into rendering Chicago both as a boy and later in his life. I mean, it was. And that's part of what Play World, that's part of what I set out to do in Playworld. I was just like, you know, I'm going to. I'm going to fully commit to, to creating the sight sounds, the slant of light, the griminess, as I thought it was like pointed out so beautifully in the Jacobs review, but an enduring magic of Manhattan that keeps getting reiterated generation to generation.
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A
There are parts of this book that have made me laugh, I have to admit. It's in two parts. It's in a Carter administration and the Reagan Commission. I'm up to Carter. Yes, don't tell me anymore. Well, you can tell me a little bit more. Why did you want to define the book between the Carter administration and the Reagan administration?
- [04:54]
C
Oh, it's such a good question, you know. Well, first of all, because it was such a consequential moment in American history, which on a spooky action level, with Carter just recently dying and us having, you know, an entertainer president coming in, which of course I didn't plan for, has these odd echoes. But, you know, here's what I came to realize as I was writing a book about that Distinction, you know, so much of. Well, it's kind of like what was the Reagan era's main message more and more and more? Well, it was more and more. It was more and more and more, but it was dereg small government. Right. And so we move from the Carter administration, with all of its malaise, into the get mine now era of the go go 80s, the Reagan administration, where, you know, in the Reagan administration, just like we were parented at that time, we Gen Xers, we were deregulated. We were kids parented by deregulated, we had deregulated parenting.
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A
Yes.
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C
Right. And so. And so. And so in some ways, the parents in the novel stand in for the political sphere and, and kind of manifest the voracious appetites that we just saw, you know, coming to. Coming to fruition in the Reagan era. I will say this one other thing, which is also that, you know, there's a way in which, you know, some of the major changes in tax policy began in 1981 when Reagan signs the Kemp Roth act, which seems, like, wonky, maybe to listeners, but it was one of the biggest tax cuts in history. And so it's the beginning of America cashing a check on the future and that they're not sure how they're going to pay back. And so in some ways, that's what the adults kind of do in Griffin's world. So, yeah, deregulated parenting, which is, of course, like the things that Griffin does that I did in my childhood, childhood in America, I think are unimaginable to allowing parents, parents allowing their kids to do.
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A
Now, I'm wondering about the age of 14. Griffin's 14. I was 14 in 1980. I remember.
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C
Yes.
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A
I grew up in Jersey. You wish you could be a kid in New York when you were 14. What is it about being 14 in New York at this time?
- [07:34]
C
Well, that's such a great question because it is usually for most kids, such a pivotal year in terms of moving from simply taking the world as it is to beginning to question it, which, if you, if you look at the arc of Griffin's. I mean, I won't spoil it for you, Alison.
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A
Thank you.
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C
But if you look at, if you, if you look at the arc of Griffin's. Of his, you can spoil it.
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A
It's okay.
- [08:01]
C
My job. I mean, he begins to learn how to say no to certain things. And part of that is him beginning to have a critical posture toward these things that are happening to him that are. That are terrible. And he begins to learn how to protect himself, which is why. I mean, what's his name? His name is Griffin. What's a griffin? A griffin in mythology is a monster that protects valuable things. And so part of what Griffin is learning to do in his sort of monstrous transformation is learning how to protect himself. And so to me, that's what 14 is. Because, you know, you see strange things, but you start to come up with a language for both, you know, your own experience and a language for your own boundaries and sense of self. You're just beginning, I mean, that's how we leave Griffin in the novel. He's just beginning to articulate who he is and what he values.
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A
We are talking about the novel Playworld by Adam Ross. Griffin makes a move on Naomi at a family party. Why is he so bold in that moment?
- [09:15]
C
Because he has no idea what he's doing. Because, because, because I think Griffin's great talent is for cosplaying adulthood. Griffin's great talent is also cosplaying childhood. And he can toggle between those roles, but because he doesn't know what kind of deep waters he's in, he doesn't realize that in the heat of Naomi's initial attention at this party, because he's kind of an attention starved kid, as I think, again, a lot of Gen X kids were, in weird ways. They weren't starved for friendship, but they were starved, I think, for a certain kind of parental attention. He performs himself and he knows that, you know, maybe this is what he should be doing. But he almost like forgets he's 14.
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A
Is that because he's an actor? Is that why he's performing so much?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think he's had success as an actor by, I mean, what is a child actor? A child actor, generally speaking, does not have any kind of sense of technique. A child actor, generally speaking, is comfortable being him or herself in front of the camera.
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A
And having some charisma, too.
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C
And having, yeah, and having some charisma, which Griffin, which Griffin does have. But, but, but, but again, there's not any self consciousness. And so he unwittingly, he unwittingly steps into her line of sight in ways that he's not prepared for. And going back to your earlier question, Alison, you know, he's also becoming a young man. And he, you know, he, you know, he's described in the novel. I mean, he's a, he's a handsome young man. And so, and, and, and so being on the cusp of adulthood, I think he signals to her a certain kind of childhood that maybe she's lost because she's in an unhappy marriage. And so, boom, Unwittingly, the attraction is established. You know, they give each other something. She gives him attention, which he desperately needs, and he kind of gives her back a kind of innocence and a kind of passion. If, you know, as gray. As gray an area as it is. He does.
- [11:27]
A
But Naomi really likes to listen to him.
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C
She does.
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A
What does she get out of listening to him?
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C
Well, I mean, I think that what she gets out of it is openness. And actually, I think at some point in the novel, as I recall in part one, she says to him, you know, I really appreciate what an open book you are. And I think for Naomi, in. Look, there's. There's. There's no worse thing to suffer than loneliness in marriage. To me, it's one of the most acute forms of loneliness. Right? And that's. And that's what I thinks. She's suffering. And so she too, is so available to that kind of intimacy of just. Of just. Of a young boy man just sharing everything. And that's how they start to get into trouble. That's how she lures him in some ways into forms of trouble. Because, of course, it's predation. I would never want the gray facts, the ambiguous facts of their relationship to muddle the fact that what she's doing is she's taking advantage of a situation. She's the adult. She recognizes that he's vulnerable, but she develops feelings for him.
- [12:49]
A
We learn early on in the book that when Griffin was little, he accidentally caused an apartment of fire that destroyed all the family belongings. Yes, he killed the cat.
- [12:56]
C
Yes, the cat.
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A
Spoiler, spoiler. How do you think this affects Griffin in his teenage years?
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C
Okay, I do just want to say there were certain people who read early versions of the novel, and they were like, you killed the cat. How dare you kill the cat? So you definitely found, like, who are cat lovers and who are dog lovers. But how do I think it affects Griffin? I mean, what it does is Griffin has two things. He has an enormous sense of guilt and responsibility. But also the most important thing is that the way in which his father in particular handles Griffin understanding what he did in an age where maybe it's really too early for Griffin to understand what he did or the way in which his father kind of foists responsibility for that event on him. What it does, and this is something that happens in a lot of trauma, is it peels Griffin away from himself. He disengages as a kind of, I think, defensive reaction. From his own feelings. And that detachment, that feeling of detachment from his own feelings is, again, one of the novels, I think, most important arcs, which is, is he going to, you know, reconnect with himself? Because. Because his acting. His acting in real life, you know, when he plays himself in real life, that is a defensive strategy. That is. That is. That is a. That is. That is chameleonic. That is, you know, in all the oceanic imagery that's in Playworld. That's. That's. He's like a cuttlefish. You know, he just can disappear into background. That's what his family of origin has taught him because of something he wasn't responsible for. I mean, if you leave out candles, lit candles, your kid is gonna play pretend and maybe do something unwittingly bad, but he learns how to feel his feelings without fear of retribution.
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A
I wanna get one more thing in before we run out of time. Is his wrestling coach. He's really involved with wrestling.
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C
Yes.
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A
There's a lot that goes on there. You write about wrestling in such vivid detail. Did you wrestle?
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C
I'm gonna brag on myself. I was a New York state champion wrestler in high school. Yes. Yes. So I wrestled for six years in high school, and now I do jiu jitsu, and I've been doing jiu jitsu for eight years.
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A
What does wrestling mean to Griffin?
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C
Wrestling is the place where there is no acting, there is no dissembling. Wrestling is the. Is the gladiatorial pit where nobody's can pretend to be anything other than they are. And so Griffin relishes this space where he's pitted against somebody. His weight. His.
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A
Sometimes his weight.
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C
Well, sometimes his weight, you know, if he makes weight. But it's pitted against somebody where who he is is revealed to him in the contest. And so he is passionate about this. But it's also the place, if you think about his sort of, you know, original trauma, it's the place where he can possibly become adept enough to overpower these monsters that are all around him. But, you know, he does have an abusive wrestling coach. And that's another adult character in a book that also touches on D and D. Yes.
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A
It is an entire chapter called Dungeons and Dragons.
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C
That's right. He's gotta fight monsters. And so when you wrestle, you fight monsters, but sometimes in life, you fight other kinds of monsters.
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A
That was my conversation with Adam Ross about his new novel, Play World. Coming up, a new HBO docu series tells the story of the life and career of Billy Joel. I speak with director Susan Lacey about Billy Joel. And so it goes.
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D
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.