This week on the Sewanee Review Podcast, editor Adam Ross assumes the role of interviewee, where he sits down with Justin Taylor—author of the novels Reboot and Ghosts of Anarchy, frequent Review contributor, and director of the Sewanee School of Letters—to discuss his highly anticipated novel Playworld. Playworld is a sweeping bildungsroman centered on child actor Griffin Hurt, whose story spans a year in his life as he grapples with the perils of self-performance and the crude dissolution of youth:
In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.
Ross speaks candidly about the challenges (personal, professional, and craft-related) that arose throughout his fifteen-year writing process, a process that began following the publication of his debut novel Mr. Peanut in 2010. “I could not figure out a way to tell the backstory of this character,” Ross says, “in a way that didn’t do anything but just throw the novel into a pile of quicksand.”
Over the course of their conversation, Taylor and Ross consider present and past influences on the novel’s creation, including Ross’s ascension as editor of the Sewanee Review in 2016, as well as the “strangeness” of a virtually unsupervised childhood in 1980s Manhattan. The freedoms and dangers of this “deregulated parenting” was in some ways mimetic on a national scale as the country transitioned into the Reagan administration. The “hyper-technical,” “hyper-lyrical” nostalgia of Playworld, full of adult negligence, wrestling philosophy, child acting, and Dungeons & Dragons, is a pressurized time capsule of an era intimately known to the author.
Adam Ross is the author of two novels and the short story collection Ladies and Gentleman. His debut novel, Mr. Peanut, was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. In 2016, he was tapped to revitalize The Sewanee Review in its 125th year. Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters.
The Sewanee Review Podcast is recorded in the Ralston Listening Room at the University of the South. This episode is produced by Luke Gair and edited by ProPodcast Solutions with music by Annie Bowers. Image credit to Emily Dorio. Don’t miss any of our conversations with some of today’s best writers. Subscribe to the Sewanee Review Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.