Playworld, by Adam Ross: Parents Just Don't Understand

Playworld, by Adam Ross, is a long, often dense, sometimes directionless novel about a teenage actor’s coming of age in early 1980s NYC. But more so, it’s about adults being constantly and consistently disappointing.

I should’ve loved this — it feels like a throwback novel. There are some Dreiser vibes here, especially An American Tragedy (so it’s likely not a coincidence our character here is named Griffin, which is close enough to Griffiths?). Griffin is tossed along on an ocean of circumstance (naturalism, anyone?), and dealing with issues not of his making and far above his maturity level — a gross wrestling coach, an affair with an older woman, paying for his own schooling, a small amount of notoriety from his acting, etc.

This should’ve worked splendidly, but…it just felt aimless. None of Griffin’s individual issues, which are HUGE DEALS, ever really felt like they were given the weight they deserved. Instead, we spend a ton of time on Griffin’s first age-appropriate crush — which, had that been the novel, would’ve been fine (and the book would’ve been about 200 pages shorter).

The biggest issue in Griffin’s life, however, is how every adult he wants to rely on — teachers, coaches, his fellow actors, and most notably his parents — lets him down. It feels to him like every adult in his life is just playacting at being an adult. Others have compared this novel to a slightly more modern The Catcher In The Rye, but Griffin is not nearly as adept at Holden Caulfield at identifying the phonies. So it’s no wonder Griffin struggles. 

Look, Ross is a magnificently astute writer -- he's really good at crafting long (again, often dense) paragraphs teasing out a single idea. I loved these and often looked forward to them more than the next plot point. And I will definitely read whatever it is he does next (though it's been 15 years between novels, so who knows), but this was a miss for me. 

Five Thoughts Upon the Occasion of Finishing Lonesome Dove

Earlier this summer, I put up a poll on Instagram asking which "dead white guy" book I should read this summer: Lonesome Dove, The Grapes of Wrath, or The Brothers Karamazov. Lonesome Dove won in a landslide! I had no idea so many people -- and so many people from a WIDE swath of otherwise disparate literary tastes -- had read and loved this book. I heard from writers I admire, readers with whom I hadn't talked in months, even an old friend from college -- all said Lonesome Dove was one of their favorite novels of all time.

Parallel to this was another thing I didn't even know about, but soon discovered: Lots and lots of other people were also reading Lonesome Dove. In March, Esquire even published a story titled "Why Is Everyone Reading Lonesome Dove?" The easiest explanation, and these days, the one immutable rule of book trends: When something weird happens, blame TikTok. BookTok may partially explain it, and Larry McMurtry's death in August 2023 certainly helped renew interest, but likely the biggest reason: It's just really freakin' good. BookTok occasionally leads us astray (cough, Colleen Hoover, cough cough), but in the case of Lonesome Dove, it led us to the promised land. And I'm super glad for once to be caught up in good book trend. 

And so in mid-June, I began my Lonesome Dove journey. I spent about six weeks with this novel, whittling away its 858 pages a chapter or so a day. I finished it yesterday. I absolutely loved it. Here are five random thoughts. 

5.  The Lonesome Dove Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is real -- After I started reading the novel, I began to see it everywhere. Sports personality Ryen Russillo posted on Threads just a couple days ago, "Lonesome Dove really picks up after the first 300 pages" (he's not wrong). Host of NPR's "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me" Peter Sagal recommended it to someone on Bluesky. I got fed an ad for Peacock with a promo for the late-1980s miniseries with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones (not gonna lie, that creeped me out a little). And so, whether it really was, or I was just noticing it more, Lonesome Dove was/is ubiquitous. 

4. The "head hopping": A craft no-no that somehow works here -- McMurtry does something here with his omniscient narrator every writing teacher you've ever had has warned you against doing: Head-hopping. What that means is that sometimes he jumps from characters' thoughts to characters' thoughts from paragraph to paragraph. At first this was a little distracting. You have to pay attention to be sure you know whose having a think now. But eventually you just learn that's how this book is going to be and you deal with it. Pulitzer Prizes won by Larry McMurtry 1, Pulitzer Prizes won be me 0. So who am I to nit-pick?

3. Man vs. nature -- I feel like this is a too-easy comment, but I have to say that I sure would not have made it as a cowboy. Not only do I not like to go more than a day without showering, I hate snakes, bugs, and anything with more than four legs. In this book, there's a scene where a dude dies after being attacked by water moccasins. There's a several-hours-long grasshopper storm. A bull and a bear engage in a fight to the death (which consternated the Chicago sports fan in me). And that's just the tip of the grassy plains. Yikes. No thanks. 

2. It's a very long novel, but it doesn't feel long, and it's deep, but the pacing is just right -- It only took me a while to read, because I was reading lots of other things concurrently. But man, when you sink into this book, you really sink in. Such an amazing adventure. One of my biggest surprises in reading this novel was the depth of character. There is a ton of interiority here! I don't read a ton (any!) Westerns, and the blurb on the back tells you that if you're only going to read one Western, make it this one, and so that's advice I'll probably follow, but I was really impressed by how fully realized these characters feel, especially because there's so many of them, and especially because some of them are women.

1. Gus McCrae is now one of my Top 5 favorite characters in all of literature -- If you judge your protagonists by how much you'd like to have a beer or six in the bar with them, as I do, well then that's why Gus is now in my top 5. The wise-cracking, long-winded former Ranger is as quick with a quip as he was on the draw back in his day. But now that he's older and has hitched his wagon permanently to the irascible Call, he's more about the chat than the chase. And that's just fine. Because this guy is infinitely entertaining. At least to us. Not so much to Call.

A Bookish Scavenger Hunt, or The Time I Almost Lost a Rigged Contest

We booksellers often joke at the bookstore that when someone comes in to ask us for a vague recommendation like "I just want a good page-turning book," we freeze -- like we've never read a book in our entire lives. It's not that we don't have any ideas, it's that we have TOO MANY good ideas -- paralysis by choice, sort of. (To be fair, we do go through the progression -- "what do you usually read? what have you read lately that you've liked?" -- and that usually jars a few ideas loose.)

So when the hosts of the Chicago Writers Podcast, Dan Finnen and Michael Welch, cooked up an idea (there may have been a beer or two involved) to try a video Book Scavenger Hunt version of their popular podcast, and invited me to be a contestant, I was both excited, and terribly, terribly nervous. Would the Bookseller Freezing Phenomenon happen for something like this too? 😬

Here's how it worked. Dan came up with categories, like "the book that would be the best bad gift for your grandparents" and "the most Greg Zimmerman book here" (see how rigged this was!), and Mike and I had to run off to find a book that best fit the category. Then, RoscoeBooks' owner, Erika VanDam, judged which book we picked won each category. 

I am nothing if not a gracious winner. Much credit to Mike, who had to overcome a hostile and unfamiliar environment, a very biased referee, and extremely Greg-friendly categories. 😂 He made it close. 

Watch the whole video below (or at YouTube).

Shelf Lives, Vol. 5: The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

I'm writing this in a bookstore. RoscoeBooks. The bookstore at which I've been a part-time bookseller since November of 2014 -- nearly 11 years. November and early December of 2014 is also when I spent two of the best reading weeks of my life with The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

I'm not sure there's another book on my shelf that so quickly elicits such strong memories and sense of time and place as this one does. It's almost like one of those scenes in a horror movie when a character accidentally touches a talisman of some sort and the music crescendos and we get a horrifying glimpse into that character's evil past deeds of murder most foul. When I flashback to when the bookstore opened, it's not quite horror movie vibes...but if I'm honest, it's close.

The store opened on November 21, 2014 -- the Friday before Black Friday. We were a small staff of four, plus our owner, who was venturing into the book business for the first time. Only two of us actually had any bookselling experience at all. What could possibly go wrong? 

That first holiday season at the store was pure, unadulterated chaos. The neighborhood was SO EXCITED to get a bookstore, and there was never a moment when we weren't absolutely slammed. Combine that with the fact that we hardly had any freakin' idea what we were doing and those first few weeks in holiday-rush December were weeks that tried our souls. We hadn't yet perfected our system for special orders, and I'm sure there were several disappointed customers who'd ordered books for gifts that didn't arrive in time. We almost never had any of the popular books in stock because they'd sell out as soon as we got them back in. We didn't even have a website yet! 

But we made it. What we lacked in expertise, we made up for in hustle and pure love for the books. For the most part, people were cool. There was an occasional annoyed customer (everyone's frazzled during the holidays), but people understood we had just opened, and were so happy the neighborhood had a bookstore, they were willing to forgive us our sins. We told ourselves in January that that first month was as difficult as it'd ever be. If we'd gotten through that, we could navigate anything. (That turned out to be true until March 2020 rolled around...but that's another story.) 

November 2014 -- a few days after the store opened.

I finished The Bone Clocks (here's my review) on a mid-December afternoon right before an evening shift at the bookstore. I remember I was almost late because when I closed the book, I couldn't move. I was almost sobbing, so sad it was over. But mostly just stunned. How could what I just read have come from another human mind? 

And the book itself? It's bonkers. Just absolutely nuts. It's six interconnected stories set over 60 years centering on the life of one Holly Sykes. There's no easy way to summarize what Mitchell is up to here. Many readers are probably more familiar with Mitchell's breakout smash Cloud Atlas, and this book has a similar vibe. But more. So much more. It's the story of good vs evil on planes of existence only David Mitchell could write. And it's all set in what Mitchell calls his "uber-novel" -- a universe of his recurring characters. 

When I first finished the book, I wrote that it may creep its way into my top five favorites of all time, but I needed some distance before I could make that call. Here we are, 11 years later, and I can tell you it's still there -- still an all-time favorite. And I'm still here, working (and writing) in a bookstore. The Bone Clocks and RoscoeBooks --- two things inextricably linked, both of which I love dearly. 

Pan, by Michael Clune: A Splatter Pattern of Images, Light, and Color

I love it when a book unwittingly (or perhaps very wittingly) describes itself. Here's a sentence from Michael Clune's debut novel, Pan: "Good writing, I came to believe, was the careful, painstaking replacement of each part of the world with a part that looked the same, but was deeper, more mysterious, richer."

Good writing -- which this book decidedly exhibits -- describes the world in new ways. It attempts to take something common and make it extraordinary, to render something recognizable with a fresh veneer, to give readers a new and original way of looking at the world.

No wonder writing is so goddamn difficult. 

In Pan, though, Michael Clune succeeds in doing exactly what his character describes as good writing: He uses an array of linguistic acrobatics to make a story deeper, more mysterious, and richer. A seemingly straightforward plot about a teenager suffering from panic attacks and anxiety and trying to figure out why and how to ease his pain is rendered both recognizable and empathetic, but also completely fresh.

Readers often bandy about the cliché that good writers just see the world differently than normal people. Do they, though? Or are they just able to describe their experiences of the world better than anyone else? 

In fact, that's really what this novel is about: How do each of see the world? How are our experiences, both external and internal, unique or universal? How do we tell? Sometimes something that seems universal might be actually be unique. 

There's the classic color conundrum, which I honestly think about quite a lot. So I nearly fell off my chair when I read this sentence from Clune: "No one knows how color really looks to anyone else. It's the definition of a private experience. All we share are the names." 

Clune then goes off on a long tangent about the color of the sky in Gilligan's Island, which is both hilarious and profound, and an example of the many joys in reading this book. 

Indeed, in total, this novel is a splatter pattern of descriptions of images and light and color literally unlike anything I've ever read. Language in Clune's writing is malleable, formable, turn-able, twistable, and the result is writing so unexpectedly fresh and original, it was hard for me to put this book down. Not because the plot was riveting, but just because I couldn't wait to see what new joys the next sentence would bring. 

Almost unfailingly, the next sentence was surprising. I probably read this book way too quickly -- sometimes I got a little lost in the abstractions. Or maybe they were just too abstract and worked better in Clune's brain than they did on the page? Either way, this novel is truly a singular reading experience.