Muscle Man

Muscle Man by Jordan Castro, Catapult, 272 pages, $27


It can be alarming when a novel is about a writer. We’re accustomed to the author, if he must appear in his own book, disguising himself. He’s a detective, a professor, a drug addict. The novel about a novelist can come off like a cheap trick, something for clever college sophomores. Unless it’s done really well, of course.

The novelist Jordan Castro, in his first novel The Novelist: A Novel, from 2022, did it really well. Partly because The Novelist’s titular novelist is decidedly not Jordan Castro. Castro appears in The Novelist as himself, Jordan Castro, a novelist; but The Novelist is mainly concerned with, and narrated by, a different novelist (unnamed). This unnamed novelist’s experience of struggling to write his novel is wrung out into The Novelist: A Novel by the real Jordan Castro (as opposed to the one appearing intermittently in The Novelist: A Novel).

This is obviously not a great pitch for a book. It’s convoluted and sounds tedious. Who wants to read about a guy’s writer’s block? But Castro diligently avoids fussing over the novel’s form, never losing himself down experimental tunnels, and the stream-of-consciousness meta-narration becomes just a pleasant fact of the book’s existence, a shared state of being with its author, rather than a distracting magic trick.

We spend, over the novel’s two-hundred pages, a morning with the novelist. He makes tea, fires off a few emails, shits (for an excruciating twenty pages), and scrolls Twitter. Importantly, he avoids working on his novel; a lame-sounding druggy debut, which he knows is lame and which he routinely lambasts and compares unfavorably to works he admires. This is how he introduces it:

My novel, which had been making me feel dejected and unwell, due to its badness, was the opposite of The Mezzanine. My novel was not cerebral or immaculate, like The Mezzanine, and, due to its having been written in the third person present tense, by me, had no texture or insight at all.

Eventually, and with great ecstasy, the novelist does start writing—or outlining—a different novel. He sees an anti-natalist post by an erstwhile friend, Eric, who he now considers “juvenile.” The post sets off a misanthropic chain reaction in his head, which eventually turns inward with the novelist conceding that he and Eric are both critical of everything, because they are both afraid of everything. “We were doubles,” says the novelist, “confirming for each other what each already knew.” Then he starts writing a new novel, about Eric.

This is the major “turn” of The Novelist; and really, it barely registers. Things loosen up a bit in the novelist’s head once he starts on his Eric novel, but by then we’re so enmeshed in and entranced by his consciousness, that we hardly even notice. This is no flaw. What makes The Novelist work is not its “plot,” but the great span of its narrator’s concerns, and the judiciousness with which he attends to them. There are many, many pages full of petty anxieties about his literary rivals, or “literary types,” or a misplaced favorite tea mug, or people who hate on the fictional Jordan Castro (whom the novelist admires and thinks is “beautiful”). But these grievances are invigoratingly matched by the novelist’s more sophisticated insights about literature, memory, and narcissism.

In Reality Hunger, his polemic against contemporary fiction, the critic David Shields writes that “momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.” One might argue about the universality of such a statement, and what a “literary mosaic” is, but the idea that a kind of energy can be created within (and even by) a nearly motionless plot, is borne out rivetingly in The Novelist. The novelist’s obsessions—their chasmic breadth—create a remarkable consciousness-simulating effect. We find ourselves hitched to his freewheeling, subject-jumping thought patterns; following him from Freud and Kierkegaard to toilet paper and teapots. This is what it’s like now, in the epoch of distraction, to try to sit down and think.

Shields may or may not have been overzealous in proclaiming the linear, Dickensian novel dead in 2010; but reading The Novelist, it’s hard not to get excited about the future. It feels like Castro is working in his own mode, accomplishing the presumed-extinct feat of creating a novel that is both formally innovative and incredibly entertaining.

In one of his several tangents about the fictitious Jordan Castro, the novelist mentions Castro’s book about an amateur bodybuilder which, at the time The Novelist was published, didn’t exist. Enter Muscle Man, the real Jordan Castro’s second novel, his follow-up to The Novelist.

Muscle Man stars Harold, a professor of literature at Shepherd College, who loves weightlifting and hates his colleagues. Well, all of them except one: Casey. Casey is Harold’s idol. We never meet him, but he’s continually referenced as a kind of super-ego in Harold’s head (or occasionally a love-object: “His heart fluttered,” writes Castro when Harold mistakenly thinks he’s seen Casey in the hall). It was Casey who introduced Harold to the gym, and Harold’s distaste for his job and coworkers seems also to have rubbed off from Casey.

Like The Novelist, the entirety of Muscle Man takes place during a single day, and again we are tightly inside its protagonist’s head (although Muscle Man’s third-person creates an eerie distance). Dreading a looming department meeting, Harold wanders the halls of Lawes, a horrifying academic building which emits its own scream, “made up of all the individual cries that had been sucked up by the floors and walls and ceilings.” Harold, with apparently virtuous intentions, steals a backpack from a student. He thinks about Casey, he thinks about his other colleagues, how much he hates them, and, eventually, attends the dreaded meeting. Afterwards, he goes to the gym.

Unlike The Novelist, Muscle Man features characters other than its protagonist. Harold is out in the world. There are his garrulous colleagues, vaguely sketched students, fellow gym-goers. It’s a well-populated novel. This is bittersweet, and something is lost from The Novelist to Muscle Man: that viscous, relentless sense of interiority. Muscle Man isn’t thrillingly suffocating in quite the same way, and in reading the two books back-to-back Castro’s striking accomplishment in The Novelist becomes apparent. Compared to most novels, Muscle Man is an airtight vacuum chamber. Compared to The Novelist, it’s a sprawling meadow.

But something is gained, too. Muscle Man has something The Novelist doesn’t: a creeping, exciting sense of menace. Harold is paranoid, and the stakes are raised subtly and infinitesimally in every chapter. Walking through Lawes, Harold sees “strange limbs stretched over everything like unspooled yarn, mouths and walls making the same sad sound, a kind of scream-yawn, obliteration song.” Harold’s colleagues start referring to “recent events,” prompting Harold to imagine that “they were all hooked up to an ‘in light of recent events’ machine.”

The external world and its inhabitants seem to baffle Harold, and we begin to wonder if he might in fact be insane. Why can’t he relate to his colleagues or, seemingly, anyone? His weightlifting vitalism even seems askew. “People were born with backward brains, and they didn’t get turned around until after they started to lift,” he thinks. But Harold is meek, cowardly, terrified of his enemies. Does he really, as he claims, “enter into the muscle” while lifting? Is any of it real? Most of the nearly half of Muscle Man that takes place at the gym is occupied by Harold’s unstoppable neuroses. It doesn’t feel cathartic at all. It feels almost torturous. Even picking the right bench proves difficult:

Harold picked the bench closest to the window and lay back to warm up, but when he looked up at the bar the sun blinded him. The warm rays felt like an itchy blanket on his skin. He scooted out from under the bar and moved over to the next bench, out of the sun.

Castro filters the book’s environs through Harold’s hysteric, often psychotic mindframe, and all of this—the weightlifting, the seething, the plotting—becomes shrouded in a kind of dissociative fog; a chilling unreality. The effect is not unlike that produced by American Psycho (a thematically similar novel) and indeed Harold’s total inability to understand others in his milieu is Bateman-esque. (And perhaps the milieu which today most closely resembles the imprisoning conformity of ’80s and ’90s Wall Street is that of academia.)

It’s possible, tempting even, to read both Muscle Man and The Novelist as political screeds. The protagonists of both novels are disgruntled subjects of liberalism; men who’ve gotten the short end of the identity politics stick. Harold’s apparent insanity can be understood as the reaction of a rational man to unfair and irrational conditions. The campus is “duplicitous,” his coworkers are “bunglers,” obsessed with “intersection” and “abstractions.” How could anyone be expected to keep his head in such a place? Is the book’s creeping menace simply a contagion of ideology?

Maybe. But Castro believes, correctly, that what we hate most about others is often a screen for what we hate most about ourselves. The novelist bemoans his own similarity to Eric, the acquaintance whom the second half of the book is largely devoted to mocking. In Muscle Man, Harold muses “when we encounter that with which we should most identify, we recoil.” And so the polemic aspects of Muscle Man and The Novelist must ultimately be satirical. It’s clear that Castro has feelings about academic politics and liberalism, but he’s more interested in the ridiculousness and inherent contradictions of “resistance;” the absurdity of fighting back.

As Muscle Man muscles on, building to a truly dismaying twist in its final chapter, Castro departs somewhat from the Shields-ism about “thematic resonance.” Muscle Man, unlike The Novelist, is a novel of incident. It’s by no means “traditional,” but Muscle Man is much more narratively driven than The Novelist. It’s a testament to Castro’s talent that he can do both.

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Leo Lasdun lives in NYC.