Sunday Books & Culture
This week’s reviews include Adam Ross’s epic coming of age novel “Playworld” and the story behind “Spamalot” in Eric Idle’s “The Spamalot Diaries.”
Sunday Books and Culture is edited by Vanessa Sekinger
PLAYWORLD
by Adam Ross
Published by Knopf (January 7, 2025)
Hardcover $25.51
Audiobook $18.90
Reviewed by Penny A Parrish
When I was 14, I’d walk home from school alone, take long rides on my bike, and even visit the soda shop where a friend gave me extra scoops of ice cream. I was free to do most anything as long as I was home for dinner. But that was in small town America.
Apparently, there was a time when kids had similar freedoms in New York City. The narrator in this marvelous book, Griffin Hurt (a perfect name for this character), is a 14-year-old child actor, whose income helps pay for his swanky private school and aids the family. His dad, the grandson of Jewish immigrants, uses his rich baritone for movie and commercial voice-overs (like “It’s ten p.m. – do you know where your children are?”) as he watches his son succeeding where he did not. Griffin’s mom, a former ballet dancer, teaches kids at the barre, and studies for her master’s degree in literature at NYU. Younger brother Oren (who goes to public school) is a sidekick to Griffin but also lives in his shadow.
Early on, readers are told about the fire, which took place when Griffin was six and Oren was four. It ruined their New York apartment and all their belongings. Throughout the book, the family will share distinct and different memories of what took place that night. But as a result of that disaster, they all ended up in individual sessions with Elliott, their psychiatrist and family friend.
Not that Griffin shares much with Elliott. As an actor, he has mastered the ability to appear real when he is faking. This skill becomes critically important as he is ensnared in a relationship with Naomi, who is 36, married with two children and a friend of his parents. She meets him after school or acting class in the back seat of her Mercedes. Griffin is also incapable of separating wrestling, which he loves, from the coach who grooms him and other boys for more than inter-school meets. “Our education…was dominated by Kepplemen, over whom we were each failing to gain leverage. And who wore the costume of love. And who was, day in and day out, teaching us fury, aggression, complicity, desperation, exploitation, and, most of all, silence.”
The story is told by Griffin as an adult, but reflecting on his life as a teenager. Despite acting with stars like Jill Clayburgh and Shelley Duvall, despite getting the lead in a soon-to-be blockbuster film, despite a few other “lost boys of Manhattan” for friends, he is terribly naïve. When his English teacher corners him about plagiarism, he doesn’t understand what she is talking about. In acting, he uses lines written by other people every day.
Griffin struggles to find a girlfriend his own age, ending up once again in a situation where he is taken advantage of yet powerless to control. “…I could now name this feeling I’d been suffering…it has been so omnipresent it was more like an atmosphere – one that, having been made aware of it, I could neither unsee nor unfeel, and its name was loneliness.”
This book has been compared to The Graduate, Catcher in the Rye and The World According to Garp. To me, the writing is what makes this worthwhile. Every line and sentence is so real, so beautiful, so devastating. On the surface, this is just the coming-of-age story of a teenage boy (semi-autobiographical). But between the covers is joy, heartbreak, family, loss, and love – a reflection of all of us. I finished the book a few days ago, and I keep opening it up again to hold on to these people, their world, and these words.
Penny A Parrish is a local writer and photographer. You can see her pictures at her website, www.PennyAParrishPhotography.com
THE SPAMALOT DIARIES
BY Eric Idle
Published by Crown (October 8, 2024)
Hardcover $19.16
Audiobook $12.60
Reviewed by Drew Gallagher
Eric Idle is a genius, and I’m not the only one who believes that. If you read The Spamalot Diaries, you’ll find out that the Monty Python great thinks he’s a genius too!
Now that might be a bit unfair because the book is pulled from Idle’s diaries, and there was no intention to publish them when he wrote them. (Although, those of us who keep diaries do it on some level just in case we become famous, and we can reveal our inner selves to the world in the bad poetry we wrote in our late teens and early 20s.) The counterpoint to forgiving a degree of egotism in this publication is that the diaries never would have been published without Idle’s permission. He knew what he was doing, and any degree of self-serving “whinging” is offset by a look behind the curtain of Splamalot, one of the biggest surprise Broadway sensations of all-time.
Any Monty Python fan is likely familiar with the greatness of the source material which was the movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail (which turns 50 this year). (How is that even possible? Where are the anniversary screenings? FXBG Advance movie critic, Alan Herrmann, get on this.) Pythonites can’t look at a coconut and not think what a fine steed it would make. Or, when passing dairy cows in a field they consider how far a cowtapult could fling them from a French castle. The legend of King Arthur will never be the same.
The Spamalot Diaries offers a brief telling of how the classic film became an equally classic Broadway musical which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2005. (So, if my math is correct, this is the 20th anniversary of Spamalot which means FXBG Advance Theatre critic Dennis Wemm has some work to do as well.) And Idle is quite clear that the musical did not just magically appear from the screenplay and land feet first on a stage which he voices after a successful early table read:
“First of all, I felt no one had actually congratulated me. Does that seem petty? Ridiculous? Of course, but I have spent two years on this script. It’s seven drafts already. No one seemed to notice. It is assumed the script is Python and that it achieved this adaptation by parthenogenesis. No one in the room had even read the last draft, so they were laughing at new jokes for the first time.”
It is obvious after reading The Spamalot Diaries that Idle did indeed labor over his Broadway creation and had many sleepless nights where he probably said a lot worse than “Ni”, but we know that Spamalot ended as a box office smash. So, is Idle’s diary nothing more than a cash grab? Sure, the cynics among us might feel that way, but the diaries are enjoyable and to those cynics, I fart in your general direction.
Drew Gallagher is a freelance writer residing in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the second-most-prolific book reviewer and first video book reviewer in the 140-year history of the Free Lance-Star Newspaper. He is also the first humorist in the storied history of the FXBG Advance and is reliant upon his editors to know when to use commas.
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