This World of Dissemblers

ADAM ROSS’S NEW NOVEL, Playworld, offers readers a glimpse at the hollowness of promises, from the nuclear family to the presidential administration. With a voice that intones the perils of power, authority, and the almost-thereness of things that are, at best, idyllic facades, Ross traces a perverse tale of the all-American childhood in 1980s New York City. Fourteen-year-old Griffin Hurt lives on the Upper West Side with his dysfunctional family. He enjoys curious success as a child actor in film and television; he also, as the novel chronicles, goes on to have an affair with a 36-year-old married friend of the family.