'A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp.' Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review 'Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Line for line the book is a revelation.' Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep-along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach-he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin's senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink-whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren-Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi's Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm. Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel