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Acclaimed author of "Mr. Peanut" Adam Ross returns with "Mr. Peanut" "Amusement World" (Knopf), a novel rich in nostalgia, full of love and sadness, tells the story of a child actor who becomes an adult and becomes the object of attraction to an older woman.
Read the excerpt below.
"Game World" by Adam Ross
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prelude
In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents, Naomi Shah, fell in love with me. She was thirty-six years old, a mother of two, married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.
Twenty years later, when I finally told my mother—we were on Long Island, walking on the beach—she paused and said, shocked, “But she was such an ugly woman.” That was not what it sounded like. So trivial. If I had realized this at the time, it would have neither repulsed me nor affected my feelings for Naomi. It was just something I took for granted, like the color of her hair.
It was wire-like, off-white, shaded but without the flash of dove feathers. Naomi left it long enough that it hung past her shoulders. I know it by touch because my face is often buried in it. It wasn't until later that I wondered if she thought she was unattractive because she always wore sunglasses, as if to hide her face, large gold frames with blue prescription lenses. When we drove together (which happened often that year), she would let these slide off her nose and look at me from the bridge. She may have thought the pose was a winner, but it was more likely that I saw it better. Her mouth is often slightly open. Her lower teeth were uneven, and the tongue pressed against her teeth always smelled like coffee.
Naomi's car was a silver Mercedes sedan - a 300 standard with a nickel-plated turbodiesel engine in the back - that made a low hum as she drove. In my opinion, the cabin is huge, with sleek wood paneling and white leather, and the back seat is roomy with plenty of legroom, making the driver look distant. Naomi and I talk most often in this car. We park and she leans on the armrest and puts her cheek against mine, and sometimes I let her kiss me. Other times we would move to the back. Lying there with Naomi, her nose nuzzling my neck, I stared at the dotted fabric on the ceiling until the patterns seemed to separate and float like stars. The car was her prized possession, and like many commuters, she turned it into an extension of her body. When traffic is light, her left thumb lightly hooks the steering wheel at eight o'clock, and when traffic slows, her fingertips slide toward eleven o'clock. She preferred to sit slightly reclined with her free hand on her inner thigh, and although she lost her pinky finger the following summer, she still kept it hidden even after getting a prosthetic leg.
"I'm worried you might find this disgusting," she said, her fingers hidden between her seat and her butt. She bought herself a diamond ring to hide the seams, and for the most part the resemblance is uncanny, but at certain angles you can tell—the lines of the cuticles are too smooth, the light crescents of the nails are too creamy, and the other Nails don't match. Like the dentures my father occasionally left around our apartment, I was fascinated by it, even if my curiosity was not morbid. You see, I'm a child actor, a student of disguise in all its forms, who discovered long ago that my greatest subjects are adults.
Excerpted from "Playworld" by Adam Ross. Copyright © 2025 Adam Ross. Excerpted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. all rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without written permission from the publisher.
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"Game World" by Adam Ross
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