{"id":46794,"date":"2025-09-27T13:02:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T13:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/46794\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T13:02:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T13:02:10","slug":"a-review-of-muscle-man-by-jordan-castro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/46794\/","title":{"rendered":"A review of Muscle Man by Jordan Castro"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of Muscle Man<\/a> by Jordan Castro, 272 pages, Catapult Books (September 2025)<\/p>\n

Jordan Castro made his name in the US \u201calt lit\u201d scene with The Novelist<\/a>, a cult debut that follows an aspiring writer over the course of a distracted morning. Castro\u2019s signature knack is in creating a realistic and funny rhythm of compulsivity, which his new novel, Muscle Man, transposes onto Harold: a non-tenured English professor who\u2019d rather lift weights than give lectures. Castro wears his Dostoevsky influence on his sleeve: both The Novelist and Muscle Man unfold over a single autumn or winter\u2019s day, circling petty rivalries, refused invitations, and characters bent out of shape by bureaucracy and ego. Harold is at odds with his university\u2019s \u201cglassy-eyed\u201d administrators, zombified students, and liberal colleagues. <\/p>\n

In a knight\u2019s move, Castro has also made Harold resentful of being mistaken for a Dostoevsky scholar. Despite his insecure contract, passionless work, and stuffy environment, Harold has no interest in the lives of the over-educated, underpaid, and morally constrained. He studies\u2014and sees himself within\u2014the tradition of masculine vitalism. Harold\u2019s lodestar is Nietzsche, and like Raskolnikov, he thinks he\u2019s Napoleon. He imagines himself as \u201ca Greek or Roman statue,\u201d battling the amorphous powers that be.<\/p>\n

Harold is, of course, delusional, which makes him quintessentially Dostoevskian. He associates backpacks with peasants, and \u201chunched\u201d postures with the \u201cmasses,\u201d but he has spent so long bowing to bureaucrats that he\u2019s \u201cpractically supine.\u201d Nevertheless, Harold is delusional in a very modern and understandable kind of way. He began his academic career hoping to \u201center into communion with the great thinkers of history,\u201d but when we encounter him, he\u2019s already a checked-out lecturer with a penchant for individualist philosophies, smart enough to resent university life as a \u201cstrange kind of imprisonment\u201d but too lacking in agency to do anything about it.<\/p>\n

Once Harold gains tenure, he imagines he\u2019ll unfurl himself. Which is where Casey comes in. Though largely absent, Casey is a constant presence in Harold\u2019s thoughts and the jacked fatherly soul of this novel. Casey is a mixture of Tyler Durden, Bronze-Age Pervert, and Joe Rogan: a philosopher-bodybuilder with tenure, big muscles, and quasi-religious aphorisms about embodiment, literature, and lifting weights. Harold looks up to Casey (\u201ceveryone did,\u201d we are told), despite (or more likely because) Casey\u2019s campaign to ban \u201cevery discipline with \u2018studies\u2019 in the name\u201d has put him at war with the English department.<\/p>\n

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